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HENRY JAMES 



UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME: 

J. M. SYNGE 
By p. p. Howe 

HENRIK IBSEN 

By R. Ellis Roberts 

THOMAS HARDY 

By Lascelles Abercrombie 

WALTER PATER 
By Edward Thoafas 

WALT WHITMAN 

By Basil de Selincourt 

GEORGE GISSING 
By Frank Swinnerton 

WILLIAM MORRIS 
By John Drinkwater 

ROBERT BRIDGES 
By F. E. Brett Young 

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
By Edward Thomas 



1^^ 




y-i-o-ryi, a^A^o^arA-ayiAyy^^ & . (^. <yC€>^^^ 



idcl^ Jo^^A. yr\(Kxij)C^ 



HENRY JAMES 

A CRITICAL STUDY 

BY 
FORD MADOX HUEFFER 



NEW YORK 
ALBERT AND CHARLES BONI 

1915 



**) 



24 



^A? J^^ <o 



< ' •• 






WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH ENGLAND 



^ TO 

MRS. EDWARD HERON ALLEN 

WHO SO MUCH LIGHTENED THESE 

LABOURS, THIS, WITH 

AFFECTION 







> 

9 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. INTRODUCTION 9 

II. SUBJECTS 17 

III. TEMPERAMENTS 92 

IV. METHODS 149 
V. APPENDIX 177 



INTRODUCTION 

Let me say at once that I regard the works of 
Mr. Henry James as those most worthy of 
attention by the critics — most worthy of 
attention of all the work that is to-day pouring 
from the groaning presses of continents. In 
saying this I conceal for the moment my private 
opinion — which doesn't in the least matter to 
anyone, though it is an opinion that can hardly 
be called anything but mature — that Mr. 
James is the greatest of living writers and in 
consequence, for me, the greatest of living men. 
I might, that is to say, have thought, as I 
have, that Mr. James is the greatest of living 
men without ever contemplating thus setting 
out to write a book about him. A man may 
be supremely great and offer no opportunity 
for comment of any kind. I cannot, that is to 
say, imagine any serious writer setting to work 
to say anything about Shakespeare, about 
Turgenieff, or for the matter of that about 
Nelson or Moltke. There are people who just 
" are," consummate in various degrees, perfect 

9 



HENRY JAMES 

engines of providence. It is a little difficult, 
or at any rate it would call for a great number 
of words to explain exactly what I mean ; but 
in order to avoid the danger of being considered 
paradoxical I will venture here and now upon 
a rough digest of that number of words so as 
to plan out the ground of this book. 

Thus, when I say that no one can write 
much about Shakespeare or Turgenieff I say 
it because, thank God, we know nothing what- 
ever about Shakespeare. He is personally 
nothing but a wise smile and a couple of 
anecdotes. And his work, considered from a 
literary point of view, is too consummate for 
any literary comment. You can annotate his 
words and his historic matter to an extent that 
has provided us with fifty libraries of peda- 
gogic dullness or of anecdotal interest, as the 
case may be ; but the beautiful spirit of the 
man you cannot in any way touch. So in a 
sense it is with Turgenieff whom Mr. James 
calls at one moment " my distinguished 
" friend," at another " the amiable Russian " ; 
but finally, being worthy of himself, he styles 
him " the beautiful genius." 

And that is all that can be said about 
Turgenieff — he was " the beautiful genius." 
Again, thank God, we know as little of his 
personality as we know of Shakespeare's. I 

10 



INTRODUCTION 

do not mean to say that he is as tangibly 
indefinite a solar myth ; we know enough 
about him to be able to say that he was 
not the late Mr. Pobiedonostieff, procurator 
of the Holy Synod, and to be certain that his 
work was not written by the late Count Tolstoy. 
Fragments of his personality are, in fact, 
recoverable here and there. These two eyes 
have seen him in a studio ; a rather nasty 
Slav, Russian, or Pole has written a rather 
nasty book about him. In this he attempts 
to place " the beautiful genius " in an un- 
favourable light as sneering at his great French 
fellow- workers. To-day Young Russia sneers 
at him for not being a Collectivist, a Nihilist, 
a Marxist, a Syndicalist or what you will. 
And Young England, which is always syco- 
phantically at the bidding of any whining 
Intellectual, whether Celt or Slav, repeats the 
lament of Young Russia that Turgenieff was 
not a Collectivist, a Marxist, and all the rest 
of it. And against Turgenieff Young England 
erects the banner of Dostoievsky, as if the 
fame of that portentous writer of enormous 
detective stories, that sad man with the native 
Slav genius for telling immensely long and 
formless tales, must destroy the art, the 
poetry and the exquisiteness that are in the 
works of " the beautiful genius." . . . 

11 



HENRY JAMES 

At any rate, precious little is recoverable of 
the personality of Turgenieff. We know that 
he shot partridges which perhaps he shouldn't 
have done. We know also that he purchased 
cakes of scented soap for a mistress whom 
perhaps he shouldn't — or perhaps he should — 
have had. But the fact is that he lived partly 
amongst men of letters who could not find 
anything much to say about his work and 
partly amongst gentlefolk who did not want 
to say much about his personality. Therefore 
he remains, baffling and enticing, but practi- 
cally, too, only a smile and a couple of anec- 
dotes. About his work the critic can say no 
more than he can about that of Shakespeare. 
Its surface is too compact, is too polished ; 
the critical pickaxe or geological hammer just 
cannot get up a little chunk of that marble for 
chemical analysis. It exists as the grass exists 
which the good God made to grow, and that is 
the end of the matter. 

Similarly, as I have said, with Nelson and 
Field-Marshal von Moltke. These were " the 
beautiful geniuses " of embattled nations. 
Their genius probably consisted in their being 
ready to take chances. You may analyse the 
strategy of Nelson just as you may analyse 
that of Von Moltke, but you cannot say why 
God was on their side, and until you can say 

12 



INTRODUCTION 

that you cannot very well say much that is to 
the point. Nelson ought never to have fought 
the battle of Trafalgar ; the chances, in that 
particular spot of the Bay of Biscay, were 
seven to one that such an unfavourable wind 
must there spring up as should frustrate the 
manoeuvres ordered from the Victory, Simi- 
larly, Moltke should never have fought Grave- 
lotte ; the chances were twenty-seven to one 
that the Crown Prince of Saxony would not 
arrive in time ; the chances were eleven to one 
in favour of the French rifle ; there was 
practically no chance that the German troops 
would face that hill of death in the final 
charge and, in the event of any of these evil 
chances taking effect, final disaster was all that 
Germany could have expected. 

Thus, once more there is very little to be 
said about these matters. 

There is very little in short to be said about 
pure genius. It is just a thing that is. And 
there is nothing left for us, who are in the end 
but the stuff with which to fill graveyards, to 
say more than that marvellous are the ways 
of Providence that gives to a few so much and 
to the vast many nothing at all. But there 
remains a second — by no means secondary 
— order of great people into whose work it 
is possible, and very profitable, minutely to 

13 



HENRY JAMES 

enquire. For, if you can't say much about 
Moltke you can discover pretty easily, and 
descant for long upon, the strategy of Marl- 
borough ; if you can't say much about Shake- 
speare you might write several books about 
the craftsmanship of Goethe ; if Johannes 
Sebastian Bach defies the pen as far as his 
peculiar magic is concerned, the pen can find 
endless objects for its activity in the music 
drama of Richard Wagner ; or, if you can't 
find out how Turgenieff did any single blessed 
thing you could write a volume about the 
wording of one paragraph by Flaubert. To 
this latter category belong the works of Mr, 
Henry James. 

Mr. Henry James has of course his share of 
the talent which can't be defined. He has, 
that is to say, plenty of personality. You 
could no more confound him, say, with Theo- 
phile Gautier than you could confound Homer 
with Dante or with Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 
A)ut in addition to having — to being — a tem- 
Kperament Mr. James has a conscious crafts- 
manship. His temperament we may define 
clearly enough if Providence provides the 
words, though we couldn't, any of us, say 
where in the world he got it from. But his 
craftsmanship, his conscious literary modifica- 
tions, his changes of word for word, the 

14 



r 



INTRODUCTION 

maturing of his muse, the way in which quite 
consciously he mellows his vintages, all these 
things he has very efficiently betrayed to us. ) 
And it is this betrayal that makes one select 
his work rather than those of Monsieur Anatole 
France, of Monsieur Henri de Regnier ; for the 
matter of that of Monsieur Andre Gide, of 
Mr. Joseph Conrad, or Mr. W. H. Hudson — to 
name the other really great writers of our day 
— for analysis. With any one of these five fine 
spirits you might go a long way. You might 
define their geniuses, you might dimly guess 
at their methods, but you can't — as you can 
with Mr. James — say quite definitely that here 
he changed the words " she answered " into 
the words " she indefinitely responded." Mr. 
James has in fact given hostages to all of us 
who will be at the pains of a little grubbing up 
these definite facts as to his methods ; the 
others have given us practically nothing of the 
sort, so that, in their cases, if one submitted 
them to the pains of vivisection one must leave 
the whole question of their methods very much 
to conjecture. In planning out therefore the 
following book I propose firstly to state 
why this writer appears to me to be the 
greatest author of our day — which is as much 
as to say why he is valuable to the world ; 
secondly, I shall attempt to define his tem- 

15 



HENRY JAMES 

perament to the extent of trying to show how 
far it is a mirror of the concrete things and the 
invisible tendencies of our day ; and in the 
third place I shall attempt for the instruction 
of this day of ours, to define, as clearly as may 
be, what are the methods of this distinguished 
writer. This I am aware is, as the American 
poet said, " all sorts of a job." 

I am aware too that the charges may 
be brought against me that, firstly, in these 
pages I have made a profuse use of the "I". 
I can't help that. I have wanted to be plain 
and, in matters difficult to express, such 
locutions as " the present writer " add con- 
fusion. These are the present writer's personal 
impressions of our author's work put as 
clearly as the medium will allow. 

Moreover, there are in these pages a great 
many disquisitions on the '* conditions " of 
modern life. But for these also I do not 
apologise. You cannot write about a great 
writer of Actualities without giving some 
account of the times in which he lived. You 
cannot write about Euripides and ignore Athens. 
(I am aware that it is usual to do so !) 



16 



II 

SUBJECTS 

I HAVE said that I consider the author of TJie 
Spoils of Poynton the greatest writer now 
hving ; let me now bring forward the reasons 
for this behef. Greatness as it appears to me 
is a quahty possibly connected with, but 
certainly not solely dependent upon, artistry. 
I should hesitate in fact to say that Mr. James 
is the greatest artist now living ; indeed, I 
should hesitate to say whether any one artist 
was ever greater than any other artist. This, 
however, is a point upon which I by no means 
wish to dogmatise. If I say that I regard 
Christina Rossetti as as great an artist as, 
let us say, Horace, or that I regard Beckford 
who wrote the letters from Portugal as as 
great an artist as Prosper Merimee or Shake- 
speare or Mr. W. H. Hudson or Fran9ois 
Villon, I mean simply that artistry appears 
to me to be just a quality that either you 
have or you haven't. If you have it you are 
B 17 



HENRY JAMES 

as great but no greater than any other artist, 
and every other artist is as great but no 
greater than yourself. I do not mean to say 
that the effects of your art upon the world 
may not be greater or less than that of any 
other artist. It is very likely that the actual 
effect of Christina Rossetti upon the present 
age is greater than that of the writer of the 
single line : 

yet it would be absurd to deny that Sappho 
was as great an artist as the author of Goblin 
Market, just as it would be absurd to deny 
that the sculptor of the Winged Victory was 
as great an artist as Monsieur Rodin or Michael 
Angelo. It appears to me, then, that the 
quality of being an artist is such another 
quality as are beauty, race, honesty or fineness 
of temperament — a quality conferred by the 
gods upon the men whom they love. 

But then again we come upon the use to 
which the artist will put the measure of the 
light vouchsafed him. God forbid that I 
should say that all artists are equal in their 
output, their moral values or, for the matter 
of that, in their technical industry. The 
works of Shakespeare are longer than the 
Bible ; Fran9ois Villon was a scamp, whereas 

18 



SUBJECTS 

Mr. James in a literary sense would adorn 
the society of any Cathedral close. Balzac 
poured out an unceasing stream of imaginings 
without any particular attention to methods. 
Flaubert was thinking of methods all day long. 
I have said somewhere else that the supreme 
quality of art is to be interesting, and after 
some years of reflection upon the matter I 
do not get any further than that, though I can 
put it in another way. The real essence of 
art is a sense of appropriateness, almost as 
it were a sense of decency. The real artist 
feels for his subject a quality of chastity ; 
whilst he is handling it he will no more 
introduce into it extraneous or unsuitable 
matter than a lady of niceness will go to 
the opera in the costume she reserves for 
the golf course. At the same time, this 
sense of appropriateness in the texture and 
conception of the work will no more affect, 
say, the takings of a railway company than 
will the opera costume of any lady however 
negligent or however strong - minded. Yet 
undoubtedly writers may' quite remarkably 
affect the takings of railway companies which, 
in an Anglo-Saxon community, may well be 
taken to be the most important things in 
the world. If we put it upon a very small 
scale it is, I believe, statistically true that 

19 



HENRY JAMES 

one book brings in an income of £70,000 a year 
to the Great Western Railway Company, that 
book being Lorna Doone ; for it is estimated 
that, every year, 60,000 people visit Exmoor 
and the neighbourhood on account of the 
glamour that Mr. Blackmore threw over that 
quite charming country. Or think, again, 
of all the shipping, the railway, the transport 
and the motor companies that are kept alive 
by pilgrims to the shrine of one writer or 
another at Stratford-on-Avon. Or consider, 
again, how whole populations have been set 
moving by writings about various regions. 
How much population has the vast city which 
we inhabit gained from the poetic imagining 
that the streets of London are paved with 
gold ; or what do the plains of Canada, the 
mountains of Central North America or the 
islands in the Gulf of Mexico not owe to the 
imaginings of poets of one kind or another ? 
Consider how the Dominion of Canada re- 
sented the poetic appellation of Our Lady of 
the Snows — and why ? Simply because Canada 
was afraid that intending emigrants might be 
frightened away by that epithet, shadowing 
as it seemed to do an arctic climate. 

That such greatness then may appertain 
to the usually despised profession of writing 
few will probably deny. Nay, the great railway 

20 



SUBJECTS 

companies themselves give evidence of this 
fact, for, if you will write to any one of them 
and state that it is your intention to write 
a book about any given tract of country 
served by their line, they will at once present 
you free of charge with a first-class season 
ticket over the whole of their system. But 
they will never stop to enquire whether you 
are an artist or not, or whether you possess 
a sense of appropriateness or of the chastity 
of your subject. 

It is not however this type of greatness that 
I claim to any great extent for the author of 
The American Scene, For, roughly speaking, 
when the reader embarks upon that magnificent 
book of impressions he reads for many pages 
with a sense of deep, of complete, and finally of 
utter, non-comprehension. And bewilderment 
accompanies him through the long process of 
perusal. But when you close the book — at 
that very moment a sense of extraordinary 
reality overwhelms you. You will find that 
you have actually been in New York whose 
note is the scream of trolley wheels upon 
inefficiently laid granite setts ; you will find 
that you have actually been at Manhattan 
Beach, where ladies, so lacking in elusiveness, 
say and do the odd, queer things in the high, 
queer voices. It is. The American Scene, an 

21 



HENRY JAMES 

amazing piece of artistry, but I do not imagine 
that it ever made any single soul desire to 
join the scant company of rubber-necks who 
visit the United States. Let us not however 
deny to this distinguished author all claims 
to this particular form of greatness, for many 
of us have undoubtedly done no more in 
visiting the country of the Lilies than follow 
in the footsteps of the author of A Little 
Tour in France, 

Or, again, how many New Englanders may 
not have been brought to the Old World by 
the limpid, beautiful and delightful phrases 
of what we now call the early James? What 
may not Daisy Miller, The Four Meetings, 
A Passionate Pilgrim, Roderick Hudson, or, 
for the matter of that, The Spoils of Poynton, 
have done to swell the receipts, in the 80 's 
and the 90's, of the American touring agencies ? 
But it is not distinctively in this light that we 
have to view the greatness of our eminent 
Subject. It is not especially as the conductor 
of populations across mountains and floods 
that the figure of Mr. James saute, as you 
might say, aux yeux. His greatness, to put it 
succinctly, is that of the historian — the 
historian of one, of two, and possibly of three 
or more, civilisations. (Let it be understood 
that in this section I am in no way considering 

22 



SUBJECTS 

Mr. James' art, but merely his services to 
the RepubHc.) And, roughly, speaking the 
two services that a writer can render to 
the State are, firstly, that he can induce 
its inhabitants to become more moral ; 
secondly, he can render them better educated. 
Mr. James is practically no sort of moralist 
at all. I do not mean to say that any word 
he has ever written need bring the blush to 
the cheek of any inhabitant of any Cathedral 
close w^hose society, as I have said, Mr. 
James' literary figure would so eminently 
adorn. But Mr. James' conscious purpose in 
writing can obviously never have been to 
make people better. It might be possible 
that a perusal of What Maisie Knew might 
show to several erring personages that the 
Divorce Courts are exceedingly troublesome 
places to get into ; or, to read The Spoils of 
Poynton, might shock various other persons, 
engaged in family quarrels about money, 
into frames of mind less sordid. It is con- 
ceivable, in fact, that the works of Mr. James 
may have been a civilising agency. But I 
can observe little if any trace in all the 
voluminous works of this writer of a desire 
to leave humanity any better than he found 
it. He observes the characters of his work 
with a comic or with a patronising spirit ; 

23 



HENRY JAMES 

whether they be the victims or the oppressors 
we seem to hear him saying of them : " Poor 
dears." He would speak of " poor dear 
Maisie " just as he would speak of " poor dear 
Mrs. Gereth " who lost the Spoils ; or just 
as, for the matter of that, you may hear 
him speak of " poor dear Flaubert," " poor 
dear Shakespeare " or " poor dear Balzac," 
Napoleon the First, Napoleon the Third, or 
anybody in the world. Compassion or any 
trace of a desire to be helpful are in fact 
almost entirely wanting in the works of this 
impersonal writer. They are absent in a 
way that characterises no other author known 
to me. Flaubert, heaven knows, is impersonal 
enough ; yet it is impossible to read Madame 
Bovary and to mark Emma's frantic running 
from pillar to post to pick up a little money, 
whilst the net is closing all round her, without 
feeling that Flaubert had an immense sense 
of pity, and that Flaubert, had he come 
across Emma in real life, would have lent her 
considerable sums of money. Similarly with 
Mr. James' great master, it is impossible to 
read Lisa or Smoke or A Sportsman's Sketches, 
impersonal observation although they all may 
be, without feeling Turgenieff's immense sym- 
pathy with the mental or material sufferings 
of his characters. The absence of this charac- 

24 



SUBJECTS 

teristic is extraordinarily striking in Mr. James' 
work. Maisie is for him just a child in a 
basement. Or, if you will read either the 
original or the revised version of The Four 
Meetings you will be almost appalled by this 
peculiar passionlessness. The Four Meetings 
is the story of a New England schoolmistress 
with a passionate yearning to see Europe. 
She gets as far as Havre upon one occasion 
and is promptly sponged upon by a worthless 
relation who extracts from her all her money, 
so that she has to return to New England on 
the very evening of her arrival. And, some 
time afterwards, when she is again beginning 
to save up a little money for the purpose of 
visiting Europe — and it is impossible to say 
how intensely and how horribly Mr. James 
has rendered her yearning to see Chamounix 
or Venice — she is descended upon by the 
soi-disant wife of the worthless cousin, the 
runaway wife of someone like a small French 
hairdresser. This lady, giving herself out to 
be a Countess, battens upon the New England 
schoolmistress until the very day of the 
latter lady's death. In whichever version 
we read this nouvelle we are compelled to say 
that it is unsurpassed in the literature of 
any language or of any age. It is the perfect 
" longish short story." First published in 

25 



HENRY JAMES 

1883 and, presumably, written at about that 
date, this story has been considerably re- 
written for Volume XVI of Mr. James' com- 
plete edition which was published in 1909. 
These facts are merely bibliographical, but 
what jumps at your eyes in reading either 
version is the singular pitilessness of the 
narrator. The story, that is to say, is put 
into the mouth of a third party who writes 
in the first person. In the first version this 
narrator seems to present himself as a quiet, 
gentle, observant young New Englander. In 
the latter version, he appears to be a sardonic, 
rather florid, rather garrulous, international 
American in the later years of his life.^ But 
in neither case, whether as a young and 
modest man or an elderly and patronising 
personality, does the narrator give any evidence 
of its even occurring to him that he might 
conceivably render some assistance to the 
poor victim of her infamous connections. It 
never apparently occurs to either narrator 
to offer to lend the lady at Havre, after she 
had been robbed, five or six pounds so that 
she might at least spend a day or two in 
Paris after having come so far. And it never 
seems to have occurred to either narrator to 
say to the poor New England school marm 

^ See Appendix. 
26 



SUBJECTS 

that the cuckoo in her particular nest was no 
Countess at all, but merely an infamous 
adventuress who should be instantly turned 
out of the little weather-boarded house. No, 
the narrator just lets the thing go on and 
concludes with the scoffing remark : "I could 
feel how right my poor friend had been in 
her conviction that she should still see some- 
thing of that dear old Europe." This state- 
ment, implying as it did that a fragment of 
Europe, in the shape of the sham Countess, 
had descended upon that poor New England 
victim, seems to me to be one of the most 
pitiless sentences ever penned by the hand of 
man. 

I am aware that these remarks are open to 
the objection that, if the narrator had made 
the offer of the five or six pounds, and, if it had 
been accepted, the story would have gone to 
pieces. But of course the New England school- 
mistress would never have accepted the money 
just as she would never have believed any 
vague surmises that the narrator might have 
made as to the Countess' origin. The real fact 
is that Mr. James knows very well that he was 
giving just an extra turn to the tragedy of the 
story by making his narrator so abnormally 
unhelpful. And the other fact remains : ob- 
viously Mr. James does not consider that he 

27 



HENRY JAMES 

came into this world to make it any better 
otherwise than it could be bettered by his 
observation and the setting down of his 
observations. He does not, that is to say, 
expect to improve the world by advocating 
anything. He doesn't suggest that divorce 
laws or marriage laws or prison laws or social 
laws should be altered. He merely gives you 
material. Upon the views which you may 
gather from this material you are at liberty to 
form your verdict and to direct your votes when 
the questions of divorce, marriage, crime, or 
society may come before you in a practical sense. 
That, then, is the secret of Mr. James' great- 
ness in so far as it applies to the outer world. 
As to what may be his personal aims, as to 
what may go on within the cavernous recesses 
of his artist's mind, we have simply no means 
of knowing, and very likely he has simply no 
means of knowing himself. Nay, I will even 
go so far as to say that he couldn't by any 
possibility be the great writer that he is if he 
had any public aims. What Maisie Knew, 
that is to say, would certainly not have been 
a passionless masterpiece if Mr. James had 
thought that it was his business, as a writer, 
passionately to uphold on the one hand the 
claim of marriage to be a sacrament, or on the 
other passionately to decry the claim of the 

28 



SUBJECTS 

marriage law to any existence whatever. In- 
deed, whatever the figure of Mr. James, the 
individual, may be, the figure of Mr. James, 
the writer, is that of a philosophic anarchist. 
In the whole array of Mr. James' books, except 
for the mention of the employment of a 
solicitor — and even that appears to be regarded 
as the vaguest of expedients — in The Spoils of 
Poynton, and except for the fact that the 
divorce laws obviously have some — but a 
quite shadily defined — influence upon the 
career of Maisie, I cannot recall any single 
instance of the mention of the law, or for the 
matter of that of a policeman in any one of 
Mr. James' quarter of a century of volumes of 
fiction. This is how that formidable engine, 
the Law of England, seems to present itself 
to this distinguished writer : — 

The litigation had seamed interminable — so 
What Maisie Knew opens — and had, in fact, been 
complicated ; but by the decision on the Appeal the 
judgment of the Divorce Court was confirmed as to 
the assignment of the child. The father, who, though 
bespattered from head to foot, had made good his 
case, was, in pursuance of this triumph, appointed to 
keep her : it was not so much that the mother's 
character had been more absolutely damaged as that 
the brilliancy of a lady's complexion (and this lady's 
in court was immensely remarked) might be more 
regarded as showing the spots. 

29 



HENRY JAMES 

This, then, with its charming vagueness, 
is apparently all the legal paraphernalia upon 
which this long book is founded. Yet it is 
characteristic that, in defiance of English legal 
procedure, a lad} 's complexion should have 
any effect or be reinarked on at all in an Appeal 
Court. In a Divisional Court of the Probate, 
Divorce and Admiralty Division, Mrs. Farange's 
complexion might have played its part in the 
eyes of the jury. But in the Appeal Court, 
consisting as it does of three judges and no 
jury ; in which the witnesses are not re-examined 
and not necessarily present at all ; which 
devotes the whole of its time to the considera- 
tion of legal points — not one of which could by 
any possibility turn upon the quantity of 
peroxide used by a lady — the question of the 
state of her skin could not, I believe, have had 
any influence at all. In a similar way the 
tremendous engine of the law is disposed of in 
The Spoils of Poynton, The Spoils of Poynton 
turns upon whether a mother or a prospective 
daughter-in-law is to grab the beautiful con- 
tents of one of the most beautiful houses in 
England : — 

" And did you think," [Fleda Vetch asks the 
unfortunate son of the mother and fiance of the 
prospective daughter-in-law], " your mother would 
see you ? " 

30 



SUBJECTS 

" I wasn't sure, but I thought it right to try — to 
put it to her kindly, don't you see ? If she won't see 
me, she has herself to thank. The only other way 
would have been to set the lawyers at her." 

" I am glad you didn't do that." 

" I'm dashed if I want to," Owen honestly re- 
sponded. " But what's a fellow to do if she won't 
meet a fellow ? " 

" What do you call meeting a fellow ? " Fleda 
asked with a smile. 

" Why, letting me tell her a dozen things she can 
have." 

This was a transaction that Fleda had after a 
moment to give up trying to represent to herself. 
" If she won't do that ? " she went on. 

" I'll leave it all to my solicitor. He won't let her 
off, by Jove. I know the fellow ! " 

" That's horrible ! " said Fleda, looking at him in 
woe. 

" It's utterly beastly." 

And this, as regards the " plaintiff " in what 
might have been a protracted legal dispute, 
is to all intents and purposes all that is said 
about the law in this wonderful book. As 
regards the " defendant," the mother who sfor 
the moment is in possession of the "Spoils," 
who is sitting in the house and refusing to quit 
it, our author is a little more definite. But 
indeed Mrs. Gereth is a character of somewhat 
more definite will than are many that Mr. 

31 



HENRY JAMES 

James asks us to consider. And Mrs. Gereth, 
at least for a moment, looks at the situation 
quite definitely : — 

. . . Fleda asked Mrs. Gereth if she literally 
meant to shut herself up and stand a siege, or if it 
might be her idea to expose herself, more informally, 
to be dragged out of the house by constables. 

" Oh, I prefer the constables and the dragging ! " 
the heroine of Poynton had readily answered. " I 
want to make Owen and Mona do everything that 
will be most publicly odious." She gave it out as her 
one thought now to force them to a line that would 
dishonour them and dishonour the tradition they 
embodied. . . . 

And, in the end, in spite of the threat of the 
solicitor and the other threat of submitting 
only to policemen, the question of the occupa- 
tion of Poynton solves itself upon a purely 
moral note, as is to be expected in our author's 
v^orks. In actual English life of to-day, given 
Mrs. Gereth with her tendencies which are those 
of the eternal brigand, and, given the Brig- 
stocks, those perfectly English people — " the 
worst horror " of their house, called Waterbath, 
" was the acres of varnish, something adver- 
tised and smelly, with which everything was 
smeared : it was Fleda Vetch's conviction that 
the application of it by their own hands, and 

32 



SUBJECTS 

hilariously shoving each other was the amuse- 
ment of the Brigstocks on rainy days " — given 
these exceedingly English people, with the 
rather will-less but quite English figure of 
Owen Gereth between them, the problem 
would have become one, really, of affidavits, 
of interim orders of the court, of the pur- 
loining of small valuables, of false evidence 
by servants, tradesmen, vicars' wives' com- 
panions and heaven knows whom. But for 
Mr. James English life is a matter of smooth- 
nesses, civilisations, and that very avoidance 
of publicity which Mrs. Gereth felt to be her 
strongest weapon. 

The Brigstocks of Waterbath desired to 
acquire Poynton by right of marriage : — 

There had been in the first place the exquisite 
old house itself, early Jacobean, supreme in every 
part ; a provocation, an inspiration, the matchless 
canvas for a picture. Then there had been her 
[Mrs. Gereth's] husband's sympathy and generosity, 
his knowledge and love, their perfect accord and 
beautiful life together, twenty-six years of planning 
and seeking, a long sunny harvest of taste and 
curiosity. Lastly, she never denied, there had been 
her personal gift, the genius, the passion, the patience 
of the collector. . . . 

" Don't you think it's rather jolly, the old shop ? " 
Owen Gereth had asked his fiancee. 

c 33 



HENRY JAMES 

" Oh, it's all right," Mona Brigstock had graciously- 
remarked ; and then they had, probably, with a slap 
on the back, run another race up or down a green 
bank. 

And this the Brigstocks desired to acquire 
by marriage. 

And the real ambition of the Brigstocks, 
their real passion, was as follows : — 

At the end of five minutes the young lady from 
Waterbath suddenly and perversely said : " Why 
has she never had a winter garden thrown out ? If 
ever I have a place of my own I mean to have one." 

Fleda, dismayed, could see the thing — something 
glazed and piped, on iron pillars, with untidy plants 
and cane sofas ; a shiny excrescence on the noble face 
of Poynton. She remembered at Waterbath a con- 
servatory where she had caught a bad cold in the 
company of a stuffed cockatoo fastened to a tropical 
bough and a waterless fountain composed of shells 
stuck into some hardened paste. She asked Mona 
if her idea would be to make something like this 
conservatory ; to which Mona replied : " Oh, no, 
much finer ; we haven't got a winter garden at 
Waterbath." 

Now nothing in the world could be a 
stronger passion than the passion of an 
English family, with their solicitors and the 
paraphernalia of the law at their back, to 
stick a small Crystal Palace on to the back of 

34 



SUBJECTS 

a Jacobean house like Poynton ; and nothing 
could be stronger than the determination of 
an English freebooter of the type of Mrs. 
Gereth to prevent their doing anything of the 
sort, to stick to Poynton, to mother Poynton, 
to go on adding in spite of straitened circum- 
stances treasure to treasure. Mr. James has 
quite rightly discerned in this, his greatest 
book, that these passions are the very 
strongest that exist in English society of 
to-day. The Brigstocks would automatically 
call in a policeman ; Mrs. Gereth would 
desperately commandeer, steal, lie, swear 
false affidavits, allege undue influence, suborn 
false witnesses, and so on, these being the 
daily occupations of all quite good English 
families where questions of property are 
concerned. 

But that hasn't been Mr. James' method in 
dealing with this subject. Being, as he so 
essentially is, an un- Americanised American, 
he couldn't in that way treat what he con- 
sidered at the start and what, after many 
disillusionments, he would still like to con- 
sider — an ancient civilisation, the inhabitants 
of all these homes of ancient peace, the deni- 
zens of all these West End drawing-rooms 
and better class suburban garden parties. 
It isn't in fact Mr. James' business to treat 

35 



HENRY JAMES 

of subjects that centre round Fleet Street, 
where are to be found amongst other monu- 
ments of our great civihsation, the Royal 
Courts of Justice. In the preface to one of 
his novels he has told us that he never could 
bring himself to treat of a " down town " 
subject — " down town " being the American 
expression for " business," since most of the 
business of New York is conducted between 
Fourteenth Street and the Battery, just as 
most of the business of London is conducted 
between the Law Courts and the eastern 
limit of the City proper. No, the spirit in 
which the negotiations attending The Spoils 
of Poynton is conducted is not in any way a 
" down town," but an " up town " spirit. 
In order to get away from the affida;vits, the 
interim orders, and the writs, Mr. James 
introduces into his " affair " the figure of 
Fleda Vetch. And Fleda Vetch is, as you 
might say, the apotheosis of civilisation of 
the " up town " spirit — the spirit of that 
West End which is so distinctly not the spirit of 
the City, but which is so distinctly the spirit of 
whatever is creditable that our civilisation has 
to show. It is as if to a table of financiers, 
of '' down town " or of city men, to a board 
of directors with their devious manners, their 
queer points of view, their obscure knowledges 

36 



SUBJECTS 

of wire-pulling, of bribery with shares, of 
rigging the market — as if, to such a body, a 
decent-minded individual from the West End 
or from a country house should have been 
introduced — as if, that is to say, Christ 
should come to Chicago or to any other 
" Third Floor Back." The chances would be 
that Our Lord would do little enough, but 
still He would have a chance. And this 
particular chance Mr. James chooses to give 
to his Fleda Vetch. She is an angel making 
a wonderful visit and, if the results do not end 
in the salvation of Poynton and if they do 
end in a great deal of pain of heart to Fleda 
herself, nevertheless the resultant of her visit 
is the preservation of the public decency. 
Her apparition practically puts into Mrs. 
Gereth's head the idea that Mona Brigstock 
may be outwitted and crushed by the attrac- 
tion of Fleda far more effectually than by any 
buccaneering on her own part. And, in the 
presence of Fleda, Owen Gereth is struck 
with the idea that to serve writs upon his 
mother would be horrible, would be dis- 
gusting. Thus the story works itself out, 
down to the burning of Poynton, in an 
atmosphere of increasing delicacy. The case 
of " Gereth versus Gereth " and possibly of 
" Brigstock intervening " never got into the 

37 



HENRY JAMES 

list ; it stopped, by the grace of Fleda, at the 
mention of the poHcemen and at the mention 
of the soHcitor. 

So that, roughly speaking, if Mr. James 
have any moral lesson to incvilcate, that 
would be his formulation of his particular 
lesson — that a civilising personality intro- 
duced into an affair is better than any law- 
suit. And it should be pointed out very 
carefully that nowhere does Mr. James in 
this story preach any change of the law. He 
appears to accept implicitly the state of things 
as it is. I don't mean to say that he doesn't, 
from the contemplation of the characters, 
crawling as it were around his serene footstool, 
discern the fact that some of them might 
like certain of our laws to be changed. 
Yet even this, in the mouths of his characters, 
amounts far more to a desire for a change in 
sentiment than for a change in legislation : — 

[Mrs. Gereth] hated the effacement to which English 
usage reduced the widowed mother ; she had dis- 
coursed of it passionately to Fleda, and contrasted it 
with the beautiful homage paid by other countries to 
women in that position, women no better than herself, 
whom she had seen acclaimed and enthroned, whom 
she had known and envied ; she made, in short, as 
little as possible a secret of the injury, the bitterness 
she found in it. . . . Hadn't she often told Fleda of 

38 



SUBJECTS 

her friend Mme. de Jaume, the wittiest of women, but 
a small black crooked person, each of whose three boys 
when absent wrote to her every day of their lives. 
She had the house in Paris, she had the house in 
Poitou, she had more than in the lifetime of her 
husband — to whom, in spite of her appearance, she 
had afforded repeated calls for jealousy — because she 
was to have till the end of her days the supreme word 
about everything. It was easy to see how Mrs. 
Gereth would have given again and again her com- 
plexion, her figure, and even perhaps the spotless 
virtue she had still more successfully retained to have 
been the consecrated Mme. de Jaume. She wasn't, 
alas, and this was what she had at present a splendid 
occasion to protest against. 

It is possible that in this last sentence we 
may discern the beginnings of a ti^ace present 
in Mr. James' mind of the germs of what is 
now called militant suffragism. But it is 
none the less odd to observe that hitherto, as 
I have before said, what is principally in the 
mind of Mr. James' character is rather a 
change in sentiment than any change in the 
law. She desires more that a woman's son 
should write to her every day of her life — in 
which case she would be pretty sure to keep 
him off the Mona Brigstocks of the world — 
than any legislative enactment that a man 
should upon marriage make a compulsory 
settlement upon his wife, or upon his deathbed 

39 



HENRY JAMES 

make in her favour compulsory testamentary 
bequests. 

And the consideration, in memory of the 
whole range of Mr. James' work, doesn't seem 
to give me, in this respect, any other lesson. 

I say " in memory " because, although ever 
since the age of eighteen I have read with 
attention every work of our distinguished 
author that I could at all lay my hands on, 
and although, for the purposes of this book, 
I have made a careful, textual comparison 
between the earlier stories of our author in 
their original form, and themselves decked 
out in the fine linen in which Mr. James' later 
years delight — all the same, I can't be said 
to have made any very German study of this 
author's works. After all, Germany with its 
annotators will long survive myself ; more- 
over the French habit of writing immense and 
immensely trustworthy baccalaureate mono- 
graphs upon particular authors will also long 
outlive us and our day. Therefore I am 
presenting you rather with my impressions of 
our author's work than the outpourings of 
any note-books. This seems to me to be the 
proper method for dealing with an author 
who, more than anything else, is an impres- 
sionist. So that, when I say the only traces 
of the actions of the law to be found in 

40 



SUBJECTS 

Mr. James' voluminous writings, I don't mean 
to say that litigation is nowhere else men- 
tioned in the quarter century of large volumes ; 
I only mean to say that these passages in 
What Maisie Knew and The Spoils of Poynton 
are really the only ones that have made any 
salient impression on my mind. I am, in 
short, making for a definite purpose a carefully 
studied exaggeration. Any fault-finder upon 
the point of fact is at liberty to bring up 
against me, for instance, that matchless nou- 
velle which is a part of the " late " James, and is 
called The Bench of Desolation. I don't 
know whether the actual bench in this par- 
ticular case was the tribunal that tried the 
action or whether it was the seat decorating 
the parade upon which sat so frequently the 
victim of his country's tricky laws. The story 
— wonderful to relate — is the story of an action 
for breach of promise. You can't of course 
imagine any subject more preposterous for 
Mr. James' treatment. And indeed he doesn't 
treat it as far as the action is concerned, 
though it comes, as near as Mr. James can 
by any possibility be expected to come, to 
the mention of writs, justifications, and the 
rest of it. No indeed, this story of the ruin 
and the subsequent salvation of a small 
country tradesman gives you no more than, 

41 



HENRY JAMES 

as it were, the veriest echoes, heard in the 
suburbs — or at the seaside — of what is passing 
in Fleet Street where the Law Courts are. 
The small shopkeeper is sued for breach by 
a determined, masterful, and quite pleasant 
woman who is the last person that you would 
expect to take any such proceedings — who is 
in fact quite " civilised," quite the lady. The 
small shopkeeper — he deals in books and prints 
and is therefore himself of a comparatively 
scholarly and " civilised " kind — in his des- 
perate efforts to pay off by instalments the 
heavy damages that were awarded against him, 
and also to provide for the slight extravagances 
of a rather silly little wife whom he eventually 
marries — sinks slowly down and down the 
hill of indigence. The wife dies ; bankruptcy 
confronts him ; then there turns up for his 
salvation the woman who has ruined him. 
She is wealthy ; she appears to own hotels — 
for you never can for the life of you tell quite 
definitely what any of Mr. James' characters 
own, any more than you ever know quite 
precisely what any of your own friends own. 
At any rate, she is quite blazingly wealthy. 
And she tells the ruined small shopkeeper 
that the whole of her intention in bringing the 
action for breach of promise was to provide 
for his old age. She had foreseen that the 

42 



SUBJECTS 

weak amiability of his so civilised character 
would eventually bring him to bankruptcy 
in any case. By getting out of him a largish 
sum which was partly capital and partly 
income, she has forced him to save, in, as it 
were, her money-box, the quite enviable sum 
which, by means of successful investment, 
management and re-investment she is thus, to- 
wards the end of his life, able to pour — with 
proper restrictions — into his lap. 

Thus, it will appear that, although The Bench 
of Desolation is at first sight the story of a 
breach of promise case, it is in reality nothing 
of the sort. It concerns rather the device of 
a far-seeing woman to save a man from himself. 
I don't see that any particular moral is to be 
drawn from this story. 



II 

I don't, for the matter of that, see that any 
moral at all is to be drawn from any of Mr. 
James' work. For, if, upon the one hand, 
you get as far with The Spoils of Poynton or 
with What Maisie Knew as to say that one 
of their definite morals is that publicity and 
the odiousness of the Courts of Law are things 
to be avoided ; on the other hand, you might 
learn from The Bench of Desolation the 

43 



HENRY JAMES 

simple lesson that the publicity and the 
odiousness of the Courts of Law may be turned 
to account bv a clever woman to such an 
extent as to make, at any rate, something of 
a man out of a quite weak-kneed individual. 
In any case, the one moral for what it is worth 
may well counteract the other. 

I made my first acquaintance with the 
works of our distinguished subject during 
my gentle youth which covered the last years 
of the 80's and the early 90's. I call it my 
" gentle youth " because, whatever may be 
the case with the youths of other people, my 
own early and late adolescence was a period 
for me of extreme submission to authority ; 
it is only in fact in later life that I have 
become impatient of fools. The works of Mr. 
James, then, were thrust into my hands by 
the sort of brow-beating, " advanced " in- 
tellectuals w^ho, let us say, founded the Fabian 
Society, the Independent Theatre Society, 
The Browning Society, or any of the numerous 
Societies that flourished or merely existed in 
the 90's. And, whilst these works were thrust 
into my hands, it was enjoined upon me to 
believe, I was in fact brow-beaten into 
trying to see — as if it were the ultimate end, 
the ultimate aim, the causa causans of our 
author's existence — in all Mr. James' books, 

44 



SUBJECTS 

from Daisy Miller — nay, from that very Watch 
and Ward which is now no more than a ghost 
in woi'ks of reference— to The Spoils of Poynton 
itself ; I was told to beheve that, in The Ileal 
Thing, as in The Lesson of the Master^ in the 
Pension Beaurepas as in The Princess Casa- 
massima, the one thing for which I was 
to look was the Profound Moral Purpose. 

Now the profound moral purpose of the 
90's was a curious thing made up of socialism, 
free thought, the profession of free love 
going hand in hand with an intense sexual 
continence that to all intents and purposes 
ended in emasculation, and going along, also, 
hand in hand with lime-washed bedroom 
walls and other aesthetic paraphernalia. It 
was, that is to say, the profound moral purpose 
of the 90's, that really frightened me out 
of niy life. 

I never knew during the years when 
I was reading the early and the middle 
Jam.cs, when I wasn't, in one w^ay or the 
other, offending against the great moral pur- 
pose of the universe. And I used to read, 
say. The Diary of a Man of Fifty in the 
hope that there it would be plain — as it 
wasn't in any other terrestrial phenomena 
that had come under my view — that there, at 
least, that particular and very frightening 

45 



HENRY JAMES 

Figure in the Carpet, the moral purpose of the 
universe, would be made manifest. I read 
Mr. James, in fact, naively and gropingly, as 
the young read, in the hope of becoming a 
better Fabian and a wiser supporter of the 
Independent Theatre. But I could not square 
it out. 

I could not square it out with the work 
of Mr. James any more than I could square 
it out with the world that we live in ; prob- 
ably because the one is so like the other. 
I have said elsewhere that, considering that 
our contacts with humanity are nowadays 
so much a matter of acquaintanceship and 
so little a matter of friendship, considering 
that for ourselves, moving about as men 
do to-day, we may know so many men 
and so little of the lives of any one man, 
the greatest service that any novelist can 
render to the Republic, the greatest ser- 
vice that any one man can render to the 
State, is to draw an unbiassed picture of 
the world we live in. To beguile by pretty 
fancies, to lead armies, to invent new 
means of transport, to devise systems of 
irrigation — all these things are mere steps 
in the dark ; and it is very much to be 
doubted whether any lawgiver can, in the 
present state of things, be anything but a 

46 



SUBJECTS 

curse to society. It seems at least to be the 
property of almost every law that to-day we 
frame to be infinitely more of a flail to a large 
number of people than of a service to any 
living soul. Regarding the matter historically, 
we may safely say that the feudal system in 
its perfection has died out of the world except 
in the islands of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, 
and Sark. The middle ages with their em- 
pirical and tricky enactments against re- 
grating and the like ; the constitutional theories, 
such as they were, of the Commonwealth and 
the Stuart age, have disappeared ; the Whig- 
gism of Cobden and Bright, the bourgeois 
democracy of the first and third Republics 
and the oppressive, cruel, ignorant and blind 
theorising of later Fabianism have all died 
away. We stand to-day, in the matter of 
political theories, naked to the wind and 
blind to the sunlight. We have a sort of 
vague uneasy feeling that the old feudalism 
and the old union of Christendom beneath a 
spiritual headship may in the end be infinitely 
better than anything that was ever devised 
by the Mother of Parliaments in England, the 
Constituent Assemblies in France, or all the 
Rules of the Constitution of the United States. 
And, just at this moment when by the nature 
of things we know so many men and so little 

47 



HENRY JAMES 

of the lives of men, we are faced also by a sort 
of beggardom of political theories. It remains 
therefore for the novelist — and particularly 
for the realist among novelists — to give us 
the very matter upon which we shall build 
the theories of the new body politic. And, 
assuredly, the man who can do' this for us, 
is conferring upon us a greater benefit than 
the man who can make two blades of grass 
grow where one grew before ; since what is 
the good of substituting two blades for nne — 
what is the benefit to society at large if the 
only individual to benefit by it is some company 
promoter ? 

That is the reason for my saying that I 
consider Mr. James to be the greatest man now 
living. He, more than anybody, has observed 
human society as it now is, and more than 
anybody has faithfully rendered his obser- 
vations for us. It is perfectly true that his 
hunting grounds have been almost exclusively 
" up town " ones — that he has frequented the 
West End and the country house, practically 
never going once in his literary life east of 
Temple Bar or lower than Fourteenth Street. 
But a scientist has a perfect right — nay more, 
it is the absolute duty of the scientist — to 
limit his observations to the habits of 
lepidoptera, or to the bacilli of cancer 

48 



SUBJECTS 

if he does not feel himself adapted for enquiry 
into the habits of bulls, bears, elephants or 
foxes. Mr. James, to put the matter shortly, 
has preferred to enquire into the habits of 
the comfortable classes and of their dependants, 
and no other human being has made the 
serious attempt to enquire with an unbiassed 
mind into the habits and necessities of any 
other class or race of the habitable globe as 
it is. That is why Mr. James deserves so well 
of the Republic. 

I am aware that my penultimate statement 
is what is called a large proposition, but I 
think I am justified in making it. The English 
novel has hitherto occupied a very lowly 
position, whether in the world of art or in the 
world where sermons are preached, political 
speeches listened to, railway trains run, or 
ships plough the sea ; and, in both these 
worlds, its lowly position has upon the whole 
been justified. The critic has been forced to 
say that the English novelist has hardly ever 
regarded his art as an art ; the man of affairs 
has said that to read English novels was waste 
of time. And both the critic and man of 
affairs have hitherto been right. The worlds 
of art and affairs are widely different spheres, 
but that is not to say that they are spheres 
that should not interact one upon the other. 
D 49 



HENRY JAMES 

Indeed, my grand-aunt Eliza amply summed 
the matter up, busy woman as she was, when 
she exclaimed that sooner than be idle she 
would take a book and read. But this attitude 
is only justifiable in a world of affairs that 
can't get hold of books worth reading. For, 
when books are worth reading the world of 
affairs that omits to read them is lost both 
commercially and spiritually. You cannot 
have a business community of any honesty 
unless you have a literature to set a high 
standard. And you could not even run a very 
efficient cotton-spinning industry unless you 
kept in your mind some idea of how fashions 
change — some idea, that is to say, of the 
psychology of dress of whatever class it is 
that you have to cater for. The really efficient 
maker of Manchester goods is the man whose 
knowledge of psychology, the world over, 
is so considerable that he will be able to say 
considerably beforehand in what year cotton 
frocks will be very largely worn in the West 
End when it goes into the country, and in 
what year woollen sweaters will take the 
place of cotton frocks. Or, again, he should 
be able to prophesy at what time an increased 
demand for his wares will come from the East. 
Now I do not mean to say that a study of the 
works of Mr. Henry James, however close, 

50 



SUBJECTS 

will show a manufacturer at precisely what 
moment mousseline de laine will supersede 
white cotton ; but a careful study of those 
same books would show that manufacturer 
what a tricky thing the psychology of the 
smart to smartish woman may be. It would 
give him, that is to say, tips as to the un- 
desirability of keeping his eggs for too long 
all in the same basket. It might be said 
that the manufacturer might learn these things 
from the study of his own trade but, owing to 
some human fatality in the fabric trades, 
this is not the case. Do we not daily read that 
the English manufacturer — who is too busy 
to read novels — is being ousted all over the 
world by his German rival, a much more 
intelligent being and one whose reading of 
literature is so considerable as to be, by com- 
parison, vast ? This is not paradox ; it is 
really a fact that the German manufacturing 
class do take an intense interest in liter- 
ature. 

I have recorded elsewhere my meeting, in 
a corridor train, a Jewish stocking merchant 
of Cologne who stated to me in accents of 
almost tearful sincerity that, if his daughter 
could marry a real but penniless poet he 
would willingly give her an enormous dower, 
whereas if she married a manufacturer he 

51 



HENRY JAMES 

would give her only half the sum, and would 
insist upon the bridegroom making an at 
least equal settlement. This gentleman was 
then on his way to England where, owing to 
his subsequent exertions, his firm almost 
completely captured the woollen sweater-coat 
trade. The fact is that imagination is as 
useful a quality in a manufacturer as, let us 
say, attention to detail. And if my Jewish 
friend had kept himself as little in touch with 
the products of imagination as the English 
small tailors who were rviined by him — sweater- 
coats having, as the phrase is, almost entirely 
"knocked out tailor-mades" — my Jewish 
friend would have been as ruined as are the 
English tailors. 

But, to return to the more tangible propo- 
sition that there are practically no English 
novels that are not artistically negligible, and 
that it would not be a waste of time, or at 
any rate that it would be any more than an 
agreeable occupation for leisure moments, to 
read. Let us for a moment survey the entire 
field. 

I was once asked to write a history of 
the English novel — a technical history. I 
considered the idea at first with enthusiasm ; 
it appeared to be just exactly the job that I 
wanted. But, gradually, the glory of the 

52 



SUBJECTS 

idea faded out as fade the hues of the dying 
flying fish. As a matter of fact, there is no 
technical history of the EngKsh novel. There 
is, of course, a history. You could write about 
the lives of Defoe and Fielding and Sarah 
Fielding and Richardson and Scott and Dickens 
and Thackeray and Meredith and all the rest 
of them. But you can't find much more than 
three sentences to say of the methods of any 
one of them. They may have had great natures 
or they may have been buoyant storytellers, 
but of art they hadn't a pennyworth between 
them, and they did not care even that amount 
for analysis of human nature. I don't mean 
to say that they weren't amusing or entertain- 
ing, or some of them romantic and others of 
them calculated to take you out of yourself ; 
but, regarded as conscious literature their works 
are just splendidly null. And regarded as in- 
formers upon human nature they have hardly 
the value of police reports which colour all the 
characters black or white. They deal in 
heroes and villains, those fabulous monsters ; 
which is as much as to say that they have 
remained psychologically upon the level of 
Sir John Mandeville. We attend upon their 
performances as we attend the meetings at the 
National Sports Club, and when the hero 
bashes the villain one in the jaw we throw up 

53 



HENRY JAMES 

our caps and shout "hurray! " But that has 
nothing to do — nothing on earth to do, with 
the world we hve in. 

Mr. James has no connection with these 
amiable amateurs. If he is an un- American- 
ised American, as at the first glimpse we are 
tempted to call him, he is surely the least 
naturalised of all the English. And, indeed, 
it is only in our haste that we can speak of him 
as un-American. Actually he is the most 
American product that New England ever 
turned out. I don't mean to say that, arrayed 
in a top hat, with a shovelful of medals on 
his breast and decorated with a gaily-coloured 
scarf across his stomach, he goes hurrahing 
through the streets because some one, by buy- 
ing up the Thirteenth Ward, has got in his 
nominee for district attorney. No, the " get- 
tings in " of Mr. Henry James are of another 
order. 

But let us go back to two gentlemen whom 
I have treated with scant courtesy — let us 
go back to Defoe and still more to Richard- 
son, for, if we in the least wish to understand 
the figure of Mr. James we must consider the 
figure of the author of Clarissa. Defoe, in 
fact, was a realist of the city and of the mart. 
He touched boldly upon those " down town " 
subjects from which Mr. James' muse flees 

54 



SUBJECTS 

with averted face. But Richardson was the 
" up town," the West End reahst of his day. 
And it is amazing to consider how, tempera- 
mentally, the author of Pamela foreshadows 
for us the figure of the author of The Golden 
Bowl, It is amazing, that is, until you come 
to consider how it is obvious and predestined, 
Mr. Henry James, the reader may reply, 
comes to us from France, where he was the 
pupil of Turgenieff. That is perfectly true. 
But Richardson — the spirit of Richardson — 
abandoning these isles to Fielding and the 
Romanticists — crossed the Channel. It be- 
came re-incarnated in, it was the chief in- 
fluence upon, Diderot and the Encyclopaedists. 
Diderot begot, as you might say, Chateau- 
briand and even Stendhal ; and Stendhal 
and Chateaubriand between them had for 
children Flaubert, Maupassant, the Goncourts, 
Gautier, and the very air of the very circle 
in which Turgenieff and the young James went 
about together. It is not my business to be 
unnecessarily biographical, but I cannot resist 
mentioning a glimpse of a letter that was 
kindly afforded me by a French writer a little 
time ago. The letter was written by Flaubert, 
and recounts how Turgenieff had brought to 
see him a young American who had enraged 
Flaubert beyond belief. He had, this young 

65 



H E N R Y J A M E S 

American, spoken disrespectfully of the style 
of Prosper Merimee. Now, says in effect the 
great author of Madame Bovary, Prosper 
Merimee was no great shakes. But that was 
more than he could stand from any Ameri- 
can. • • • 

That young American was Mr. James. 

To come back, however, from this biogra- 
phical digression — to which, however, I must 
later once more return — to come back to the 
question of what is the real greatness of Mr. 
James, I must allow myself an immensely 
long quotation from one of his prefaces — a 
quotation throwing light upon, or at least 
adumbrating the matter of why during all his 
literary life he remained so sedulously " up 
town." 

What is more to the point is the moral I at present 
find myself drawing from the fact that, then turning 
over my American impressions, those proceeding 
from a brief but profusely peopled stay in New York, 
I should have fished up that none so very precious 
particle as one of the pearls of the collection. Such 
a circumstance comes back, for me, to that fact of 
my insuperably restricted experience and my various 
missing American clues — or rather at least to my 
felt lack of the most important of them all — on w^hich 
the current of these remarks has already led me to 
dilate. There had been indubitably and multi- 

56 



SUBJECTS 

tudinously, for me, in my native city, the world "down- 
town " — since how otherwise should the sense of 
" going " down, the sense of hovering at the narrow 
gates and skirting the so violently overscored outer 
face of the monstrous labyrinth that stretches from 
Canal Street to the Battery, have taken on, to me, 
the intensity of a worrying, a tormenting impression ? 
Yet it was an impression any attempt at the active 
cultivation of which, one had been almost violently 
admonished, could but find one in the last degree 
unprepared and uneducated. . . . 

For there it was ; not only that the major key was 
" down-town," but that down-town was, all itself, 
the major key — absolutely, exclusively ; with the 
inevitable consequence that if the minor was " up- 
town," and (by a parity of reasoning) " up-town " the 
minor, so the field was meagre and the inspiration thin 
for any unfortunate practically banished from the 
true pasture. Such an unfortunate, even at the time 
I speak of, had still to confess to the memory of a not 
inconsiderably earlier season when, seated for several 
months at the very moderate altitude of Twenty-fifth 
Street, he felt himself day by day alone in that scale 
of the balance ; alone, I mean, with the music- 
masters and French pastry-cooks, the ladies and 
children — immensely present and immensely numer- 
ous these, but testifying with a collective voice to 
the extraordinary absence (save as pieced together 
through a thousand gaps and indirectnesses) of a 
serious male interest. One had heard and seen novels 
and plays appraised as lacking, detrimentally, a 
serious female ; but the higher walks in that com- 

57 



HENRY JAMES 

munity might at the period I speak of have formed a 
picture bright and animated, no doubt, but marked 
with the very opposite defect. . . . 

What it came to was that up-town would do for 
me simply what up-town could — and seemed in a 
manner apologetically conscious that this mightn't 
be described as much. The kind of appeal to interest 
embodied in these portrayals and in several of their 
like companions was the measure of the whole 
minor exhibition, which affected me as virtually 
saying : " Yes, I'm either that — that range and order 
of things, or I'm nothing at all ; therefore make the 
most of me 1 " . . . 

To ride the nouvelle down-town, to prance and 
curvet and caracole with it there — that would have 
been the true ecstasy. But a single " spill " — such 
as I so easily might have had in Wall Street or 
wherever — would have forbidden me, for very shame, 
in the eyes of the expert and the knowing, ever to 
mount again ; so that in short it wasn't to be risked 
on any terms. 

There were meanwhile the alternatives, of course — 
that I might renounce the nouvelle, or else might 
abjure that " American life," the characteristic 
towniness of which was lighted for me, even though 
so imperfectly, by New York and Boston — by those 
centres only. Such extremities, however, I simply 
couldn't afford — artistically, sentimentally, finan- 
cially, or by any other sacrifice — to face ; and if the 
fact nevertheless remains that an adjustment, under 
both the heads in question, had eventually to take 
place, every inch of my doubtless meagre ground was 

58 



SUBJECTS 

yet first contested, every turn and twist of my scant 
material economically used. . . . 

As I wind up with this companion-study to Daisy 
Miller the considerable assortment of my shorter 
tales, I seem to see it symbolise my sense of my having 
waited with something of a subtle patience, my having 
still hoped as against hope that the so ebbing and 
obliging seasons would somehow strike for me some 
small flash of what I have called the major light — 
would suffer, I mean, to glimmer out, through 
however odd a crevice or however vouchsafed a 
contact, just enough of a w^andering air from the 
down-town penetralia as might embolden, as might 
inform, as might, straining a point, even conceivably 
inspire (always where the nouvelle, and the nouvelle 
only, should be concerned) ; all to the advantage of 
my extension of view and my variation of theme. A 
whole passage of intellectual history, if the term be 
not too pompous, occupies in fact, to my present 
sense, the waiting, the so fondly speculative interval : 
in which I seem to see myself rather a high and dry, 
yet irrepressibly hopeful artistic Micawber, cocking 
an ostensibly confident hat and practising an almost 
passionate system of '' bluff " ; insisting, in fine, that 
something (out of the just -named penetralia) would 
turn up if only the right imaginative hanging about 
on the chance, if only the true intelligent attention, 
were piously persisted in. 

Put into my own much less luxuriant 
phraseology these passages simply mean that, 
throughout all his life, Mr. James has regarded 

59 



HENRY JAMES 

the business life at least with curiosity and 
possibly with some small measure of awe. But 
I cannot believe, however much Mr. James 
might wish to hoodwink us into believing it, 
that our distinguished subject ever had any 
yearning to penetrate practically into the 
secrets of business life. And, indeed, let us 
take upon ourselves to throw down the glove 
that Mr. James, not being militant in any 
sense here upon earth, has been unwilling to 
throw down. Let us say boldly — for, indeed, 
in an Anglo-Saxon community it needs saying 
— that business and whatever takes place 
" down town " or in the City is simply not 
worth the attention of any intelligent being. 
It is a matter of dirty little affairs incom- 
petently handled by men of the lowest class 
of intelligence. It can teach nobody any- 
thing and, if an immense cataclysm over- 
whelmed at once the whole of " down town " 
New York and the whole of the financial 
quarters of the city of London, in ten days the 
whole system would be running again, con- 
ducted by men of similarly mediocre in- 
telligences. Of them this world contains 
millions and millions. 

It is possible that there is something to be 
said for the actual manufacturer, the organising 
producer of cotton, wool, coal and the rest of 

60 



SUBJECTS 

the material products upon which our civiHsa- 
tion is based. And it is certain that a great 
deal might be said of the inventor of new 
processes, or of the man who actually and 
with his hands works in the mines, the mills, 
or upon the face of the earth. 

The really producing classes have some- 
thing to tell that is worth the attention of a 
man of intelligence, and so have the really 
leisured classes. The one may tell you what 
sort of an animal man becomes under the 
pressure of necessity, the other may tell you 
what sort of a being he will be when, the pres- 
sure of necessity being removed, he has 
leisure to attend specifically to those depart- 
ments of life which differentiate man from the 
animal. And any other way of looking at these 
problems of our civilisation is the merest cant. 

I am not, of course, writing a sociological 
essay, and I have said no more than is neces- 
sary to make, for my own immediate purposes, 
my own immediate point. And the fact 
remains as far as Mr. James is concerned, 
that Mr. James, if he has drawn a very perfect 
picture of one phase of occidental life, has 
done the greatest service that it is possible 
to do to the humanity of his day. If he has 
done this he has, in fact, shown us to what 
tend all the strivings of the men digging drains 

61 



HENRY JAMES 

in the road, of the men setting brick upon 
brick in the building of houses, of the men 
toihng in the mines, of the inventors of new 
engines, of the clerks incessantly blackening 
pieces of paper, of the manufacturers organis- 
ing the labourers of all these people, and of 
the business men, Semitic or others who by 
the means of that most rascally of all forms of 
victimising — company promoting — take the 
profits of the labour of all us toiling millions. If 
Mr. James, then, has given us a truthful picture 
of the leisured life that is founded upon the 
labours of all this stuff that fills graveyards, 
then he, more than any other person now 
living, has afforded matter upon which the 
sociologist of the future may build — or may 
commence his destructions. 

For, given that he has achieved this, the 
problem which will then present itself to the 
sociologist is no more and no less than this — 
are the prizes of life, is the leisured life which 
our author has depicted foj us, worth the 
striving for ? If, in short, this life is not 
worth having — this life of the West End, of the 
country-house, of the drawing-room, possibly 
of the studio, and of the garden party — if 
this life, which is the best that our civilisation 
has to show, is not worth the living ; if it is 
not pleasant, cultivated, civilised, cleanly and 

62 



SUBJECTS 

instinct with reasonably high ideals, then, 
indeed. Western civilisation is not worth 
going on with, and we had better scrap the 
whole of it so as to begin again. For, you 
may by legislation increase the earnings 
of the labourer ; you may by organising or by 
inventing increase the wealth of our par- 
ticular Western communities, but what is the 
use of this wealth if the only things that it 
can buy are no better than are to be had in 
any city store — unless, along with material 
objects that it does buy, it gets " thrown in," 
as the phrase is, some of the things that were 
never yet bought by mortal's money. For it is 
no use saying anything else than that the 
manual labourer, if you give him four hundred 
a year and an excellent education, will have 
no ambition to live any otherwise, things 
being as they are, than as the dwellers in any 
suburb. And, supposing that you gave him 
a thousand a year he would, as things at present 
stand, have no other ambition than to live 
like one of the less wealthy characters of any 
one of Mr. James' books. There is no getting 
away from these facts in any Anglo-Saxon 
community, and even in France and Germany 
the tendency is much the same ; though, 
of course, in both of those countries you 
happen upon such phenomena as farmers 

63 



HENRY JAMES 

of very large income who continue to live 
the life and to wear the dress of farmers, 
without any thought of snobbishly imitating 
the lives and habits of suburban clerks or of 
hunting gentry. 

So that the problem remaining to the 
sociologist, the politico-economist or the mere 
voter, after reading Mr. James' work is simply 
this ; is the game worth the candle ; is the 
prize worth the life ? If they are not, then 
political economists must entirely change their 
views of what is meant by supply and demand, 
introducing a new factor which I will call the 
" worth whileness " of having one's demands 
supplied ; the sociologist must shut up all 
the books that he has ever read until he, too, 
has evolved some theory of what is worth 
while ; and the voter must insist upon the 
closing of all the legislatures known to this 
universe — until some reasonable plan of what 
they are all striving for shall have been arrived 
at. For the fact is that our present systems 
of polity and laws, being entirely based upon 
theories of economics, we have paid — none of 
us who are interested in public questions — any 
heed at all to the purchasing power of that 
money which by our activities we produce 
and which by our legislation we seek as 
equally as possible to distribute. 

64 



SUBJECTS 

It is because Mr. James has so wonderfully 
paid attention to this question that I have 
advanced for him — and heaven knows he won't 
thank me for it — the claim to be the greatest 
servant of the State now living. Heaven knows 
too, that, things being as they are, it isn't much 
of a claim. For as greatness goes, looking 
at the world as it now appears, when was there 
ever such an amazing, such an overwhelming 
dearth of " figures " ? Where is the Bismarck 
of to-day, the dominating figure who balanced 
our whole world in one hand whilst he used 
the other for pouring down great draughts 
of mixed champagne and stout ? I heard the 
other day that there was a Bismarck of the 
Balkans. But this morning I read that he 
had been put in prison for peculation. Where 
is our Napoleon of to-day ? I know of a 
gentleman who advertises himself in public 
conveyances as the Napoleon of the roll collar 
for the City of London, but I know of no other 
Napoleon. Where are our Palmerstons, our 
Disraelis, our Lincolns, our Grants, our Stone- 
wall Jacksons, our Emersons, our Carlyles, 
our Stephensons ? Why, even Mr. Pierpont 
Morgan is dead, and his, I think, was the last 
of the names with which you could have 
conjured through the whole world. So that 
it is not much of a claim that I am making for 
E 65 



HENRY JAMES 

Mr. James — it is no more than saying that he 
is the only unbiassed, voKiminons and truthful 
historian of our day. And, in our day, the great- 
est need of society is the historian who can cast 
a ray of light into the profound gloom, into 
the whirl of shadows, of our social agnosticism. 

I do not mean to say that we haven't to- 
day historians galore, shoals of statisticians, 
whole heaps of philanthropic novelists, whole 
armies of Fabian pamphleteers. We have also 
Chancellors of the Exchequer in huge quantities 
throughout the Empire ; there are several 
Reichs-Kanzlers in Europe, and I have not 
heard that there are any portfolios lacking 
holders in the Cabinet of the President of the 
United States. But all these things amount 
to nothing as far as any constatation of how 
we really stand is concerned. Our historians 
usually commence, like myself, as advanced 
democrats and, like myself, end as Papists 
and upholders of the Feudal system — at any 
rate, our historians are always trying to prove 
something, when they don't degenerate into 
mere machines for the collection of Vr-Kunde, 

Our statisticians are almost invariably gentle- 
men with axes to grind either for or against 
some tariff or some social policy ; our earnest 
English novelists are almost invariably, by 
some fatality, sentimental humanitarians with, 

66 



SUBJECTS 

in a public sense, an extraordinary number of 
axes to grind. Our less earnest English 
novelists remain recounters of anecdotes that 
are usually hardly even polite, or pathologists 
dealing exclusively in romantic exceptions. 
And our Fabian Pamphleteers — well, they 
are still Fabian Pamphleteers, members of 
the middle classes who try to force the working 
man into broadcloth clothes of their own 
particular pattern and into the employment 
of babies' bottles of their own particular make. 
Our Chancellors of the Exchequer — well, they 
are merely the opportunists of the moment, 
trying to force collectivist legislation upon 
an unwilling world when their particular 
party label bespeaks them individualists, or 
preaching individualist sentiments beneath a 
collectivist banner to audiences equally un- 
willing. As to the United States Cabinet — 
well, I know nothing about it ; but then, 
neither, I think, does anyone else outside 
Washington. 

Now God forbid that I should be held as 
saying that any of our eloquent Chancellors, 
Fabian Pamphleteers, earnest and humani- 
tarian novelists or upholders of the feudal 
system are in the wrong. They are probably 
every one of them absolutely in the right, and 
each of them would be the infallible saviour of 

67 



HENRY JAMES 

Society if only Society would listen to them, 
or if human nature could be kept from creeping 
in. But the point is that each and every one 
of them is a partisan of something or other — 
each and every one of the considerable figures, 
such as they are, of the world of to-day, with 
its confusing currents, its incomprehensible 
riddles, its ever present but entirely invisible 
wire pulling, and its overwhelming babble, its 
whole surface dominated by the waving of 
the halfpenny papers — every " figure " in the 
world is a partisan of some cause or other. 
Even M. Anatole France, who is a great, 
clear and negational intellect, is an anti- 
religious socialist, and to that end colours all 
his writings, observing like any other politician 
only that which he desires to observe. Mr. 
James alone, it seems to me, in this entire 
weltering universe, has kept his head, has 
bestowed his sympathies upon no human 
being and upon no cause, has remained an 
observer, passionless and pitiless like the 
narrator of The Four Meetings. As a writer, 
he has had no more sympathy for chivalrous 
feelings than for the starving poor. He 
just sits on high, smiling his sardonic smile and 
exclaiming from time to time : " Poor dear 
old world ! " 



68 



SUBJECTS 



III 

What then distinguishes Mr. James' picture 
of society — since I have claimed for it so high 
a quahty of truth — from the pictures drawn 
by Walter Scott, Thackeray, Alexander Dumas, 
who is to all intents and purposes an English 
novelist, or, say, from the works of Charles 
Dickens or Charles Reade ? 

Dickens was, of course, a propagandist, but, 
when he is engaged in propagandising, his work 
is so crude as to be almost beneath notice, 
and as much might be said for the late Charles 
Reade. Their novels aimed at the reform of 
definite institutions — the convict prison, the 
debtors' prison, the lunatic asylum and the 
workhouse. They took hard cases of institu- 
tions of this description, peopled them with 
characters all black, who perpetrated physical 
violences and other tyrannies upon characters 
who were white-hued as the angels are. They 
achieved notable reforms but, as writers, 
they were merely negligible in so far as the 
reforming passages of their works were con- 
cerned. A considerably greater skill in 
characterising is employed by the reforming 
novelists of to-day — by Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. 
Wells and other writers with purposes. But 

69 



HENRY JAMES 

their works probably lose dynamic power 
as pamphlets on account of the art that they 
employ, whilst the value as documents is 
seriously impaired by the bias of their minds. 
And these more modern writers are dis- 
tinguished as coming after the distinct cleavage 
that is to be observed in the history of the 
English novel — a cleavage that began to be 
observed in the 80's and 90's of the last 
century. Roughly speaking, until that time 
the English novelist was a teller of stories 
more or less rattling in which the characters 
were as sharply differentiated into sheep and 
goats as, to take typical examples, Tom Jones 
is differentiated from Mr. Blifil, Tom Pinch 
from Uriah Heap, or Clive from Barnes New- 
combe. Thackeray, of course, began to have 
some vague idea that a conventional villain 
may be a person quite as meritorious and 
much more heroic than the conventional hero. 
Therefore he could give you the figure of Becky 
Sharp, over whom he moralised in a brandy- 
fied manner characteristic of the Georgian era 
— for Thackeray was a Georgian far more than 
a Victorian. But still, upon the whole, these 
were just stories — the stories of non-moral 
lives, lived by non-moral people. In order 
to give themselves dignity, both Fielding and 
Thackeray — and all their followers after them 

70 



SUBJECTS 

— indulged in fits of moralising. This, since 
it was in solid chunks, the reader could con- 
veniently skip in order to get on with the 
story. This tendency to buttonhole you, 
drag you into a corner and utter ethical 
rhapsodies, was the tribute these novelists 
paid to the public Anglo-Saxon belief that 
the reading of novels was a waste of time. 
Messrs. Thackeray, Fielding and school wished, 
as it were, to show that, although they were 
classed with mere tellers of stories like Scott, 
Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Harrison Ainsworth 
and the rest, they really when they got the 
chance could moralise as well as any bishop 
in any sermon, or as well as any Professor 
Ruskin, Mr. Carlyle and the rest of the Victorian 
prophets. Charles Reade and Charles Dickens, 
anxious also to assert the respectability of 
their professions, took upon themselves the 
jobs of reforming, as we have said, gaols, 
lunatic asylums and workhouses. When they 
had done this they could cry out : " Behold, 
we have cleared out these dark places in the 
land, we are no longer mere tellers of stories." 
And indeed they weren't — or indeed they 
were, according as their stories are skilfully 
or unskilfully told. But with the coming of 
the 70's, 80's, and 90's a new spirit began to 
percolate even into England. Into New Eng- 

71 



HENRY JAMES 

land it had percolated even earlier, because 
New England with its centre at Concord, 
Massachusetts, with its highly refined moral 
atmosphere, its essentially Old English habits 
of life and its New England conscience, which 
is so much more a self -consciousness — New 
England with its Emerson, its Holmes, its 
Thoreau and, for the matter of that, its 
Nathaniel Hawthorne, was in a much more 
gentlewomanly frame of mind than ever 
London, with its metropolitan spirit could by 
any possibility be. Boston in fact, germless 
and clean, was much more ready for the 
inroads of a new cultural bacillus than ever 
could be an old-world centre with its dark 
places and its ungentlewomanly habits. The 
new influence came much more in the shape 
of Turgenieff than in the shapes of Flaubert 
or George Sand ; for there is nothing in 
Turgenieff that could bring the blush to the 
cheek of any Boston gentlewoman. If you 
will take the trouble to read excellent and 
high-minded journals like the Atlantic 
Monthlies of the seventies, you will be amazed 
to find the immense influence that the " beauti- 
ful genius " must have had upon American 
thought and possibly even upon American 
life. You will find, particularly amongst the 
important sections devoted to correspondence, 

72 



SUBJECTS 

letters enough to fill volume after volume 
wherein the Boston young ladies asked im- 
ploring questions of the editor as to whether 
Bazarof was really a nice character, or even 
as to whether Liza should have given up 
Lavretsky. You will thus observe that New 
England, far earlier than England, began to 
concern itself with the real questions of 
humanity — which are precisely the questions 
as to whether Bazarof was really a nice 
character, and as to whether Liza really ought 
to have given up Lavretsky — far earlier than 
did the England which is on the eastern side 
of the Atlantic. And then, almost imme- 
diately afterwards, you begin to find the same 
young ladies writing their enthusiastic or 
imploring letters to the editor as to the ethics 
of Daisy Miller, or as to whether Madame de 
Cintre ought really to have given up the 
American. America was, in fact, ready to 
receive an even more dispassionate writer 
than was Turgenieff, and that more dis- 
passionate writer was ready in the shape of 
Mr. James. It had, indeed, been ready for 
years before both for England and for the 
Western World in the figure of Anthony 
Trollope, who is a great figure too often for- 
gotten. But Trollope, for reasons which I 
do not now wish to go into, was nearly as 

73 



HENRY JAMES 

much neglected in New England as were 
those two other very great writers, Jane 
Austen and Mrs. Gaskell. I don't mean to 
say that America at large, at this period, did 
not go on reading writers of the school of 
Dickens and Thackeray or novels as porten- 
tous as The Mill on the Floss or Daniel 
Deronda. But the hub of the universe had 
succumbed to Turgenieff and to his disciple, 
Mr. Henry James. Later, it succumbed to 
Mr. William Dean Ho wells. 

Mr. George Moore has somewhere cruelly 
said that Mr. James came to Europe to study 
De Maupassant, and that Mr. Howells re- 
mained in America and studied Mr. Henry 
James. But a more exact rendering of the 
statement would be that Mr. James came 
to Europe and went about Paris in the society 
of M. Turgenieff, whilst Mr. Howells remained 
in New England and bathed himself in the 
New England atmosphere with the New Eng- 
land conscience and all. (Mr. Howells, I 
believe, resided, or at any rate resides physi- 
cally, in New York ; and the state of New York 
is not, technically, a New England State. 
But, though Mr. Howells' body may have been 
physically somewhere up-town between Broad- 
way and Fifth Avenue or somewhere down- 
town in the neighbourhood of Franklin Square, 

74 



SUBJECTS 

there can be no doubt that his soul was always 
on the Common, with its high avenues of 
thin-leaved elms, somewhere near the statue 
of that distinguished Englishman, George 
Washington, or at any rate between that 
statue and Trinity Church.) In the mean- 
while, in England in the 70's there was no 
Boston for Turgenieff to devastate. There was, 
however, the ^Esthetic Circle. These poets and 
painters were not so gentlewomanly and much 
less emasculated, and were beginning to lay 
claim to some of the intellectual tyranny that 
was exercised over the great Republic of the 
West by those refined personages with their 
atmospheres kept clean by the winds from 
Boston Bay. The English ^Esthetic Circle 
never got so far as taking up Maupassant, 
who came a little later ; but Rossetti remotely 
and dimly perceived some of the qualities of 
Flaubert, and with some enthusiasm he ac- 
claimed the greatness of Turgenieff. Tur- 
genieff, both as a writer and as a man, was 
introduced into the ^Esthetic Circle by a 
queer figure called Ralston, like Turgenieff, 
a gentle giant but of suicidal tendencies, who 
had lived much in Russia and who first trans- 
lated a story of Turgenieff's — I forget which — 
into an occidental tongue. And in those 
days, for Rossetti or Morris or Swinburne to 

75 



HENRY JAMES 

" take up " writers was for those writers to be 
sure of at least a succes d'estime. Theo 
Marzials would talk about them and write 
about them, so would O'Shaughnessy, so 
would Oscar Wilde, so would Lady Mount 
Temple and so would a limited section of the 
Press and of society. In its dim and muddled 
way, intellectual England would be beginning 
to receive a new influence. And what was 
happening was really that the spirit of 
Richardson, which had crossed the Channel 
to light on Diderot, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, 
Flaubert and Turgenieff, was coming back to 
England, or if you like, that English in- 
tellectual life was coming back into the main 
stream of European culture. I remember 
that, as a boy, the books that I was told to 
read by my grandfather, who himself was a 
figure in the aesthetic society of that day, 
wxre firstly, of course, the poems of Byron — 
which I couldn't by any possibility read — 
and then Lisa, A Sportsman's Sketches, 
Fathers and Children, and, later, Stendhal's 
Le Rouge et le Noir and Flaubert's Madame 
Bovary. That would be in 1891. 

But the European " influence " was as yet 
quite subterraneous. It was, as it were, 
practised in the cellars of the time, this 
reading of the works of the great Russians 

76 



SUBJECTS 

and the great French. For some reason or 
other, except for Daisy Miller, I do not think 
that tlie ^Esthetics ever read much of Mr. 
Henry James, who had at that date been 
writing for about sixteen years. I am too 
young, of course, to say from personal obser- 
vation how^ far Mr. James' fame had penetrated 
in circles non-aesthetic, but I should be 
inclined to say that, as far as he was concerned, 
the silver Thames flowed undisturbed and with 
no signs of conflagration. The great awaken- 
ing of the 90's was heralded for him by the 
following episode, which I will leave Mr. 
James to recount.^ 

My clearest remembrance of any provoking cause 
connected with the matter of the present volume 
applies ... to ... an effort embalmed, to fond 
memory, in a delightful association. I make the 
most of this passage of literary history — I like so, as 
I find, to recall it. It lives there for me in Old 
Kensington days ; which, though I look back at 
them over no such great gulf of years — The Death 
of the Lien first appeared but in 1894 — have already 
faded for me to the complexion of ever so long ago. 
It was of a Sunday afternoon early in the spring of 
that year : a young friend, a Kensington neighbour 
and an ardent man of letters, called on me to introduce 
a young friend of his own and to bespeak my interest 

1 Preface to Volume XV of tlie Collected Edition of the novels 
of Henry James, 1909. 

77 



HENRY JAMES 

for a periodical about to take birth, in his hands, on 
the most original " lines " and with the happiest 
omens. What omen could be happier, for instance, 
than that this infant recueil, joyously christened even 
before reaching the cradle, should take the name of 
The Yellow Book — which so certainly would com- 
mand for it the liveliest attention. 

It is not for me to state whether The Yellow 
Book was merely a land post on the edge of 
the cleavage that I have described, or whether 
it was both a land post and the wedge that 
drove itself in. It is certain that The Yellow 
Book gave a chance for publication, which 
didn't exist before and which has certainlv 
never existed since — a chance for publica- 
tion to really fine work of a high technical 
order. Technically, indeed, I should say that 
this periodical, which was so lacking in in- 
choateness as to be hardly a periodical at all 
but rather a periodically interrupted produc- 
tion of matter of permanent interest — this 
periodical represents the high-water mark of 
English achievement in the world of the 
Arts. Nothing that came before it was worth 
much attention from the serious critic, and 
nothing that came after it, if we except per- 
haps Mr. Henley's National Observer. How- 
ever that may be, it is certain that The Yellow 
Book meant for the serious critic the end of 

78 



SUBJECTS 

having to pay attention to the botched 
and amateurish productions of the schools of 
Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, Dumas and 
George EHot. I don't mean to say that the 
EngHsh " nuvvle " hasn't gone on being 
produced and being acclaimed by the English 
Press. 

But the critic — who isn't compelled by the 
same trade exigencies as is the reviewer — has 
had, since 1894 or thereabouts, a small body of 
work produced which is up to a point worthy of 
his attention and which may at least legitimately 
excite his curiosity. Roughly speaking, before 
the 90's there was nothing at all — literally 
nothing at all except the novels of Trollope. 
Since 1894 there have been at times two or three, 
at times five or six, books a year to which 
someone of intelligence might turn his atten- 
tion. You might, that is to say, without 
serious diminution of self-respect, read the 
works of Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Arnold Bennett, 
Mr. H. G. Wells, of the late George Gissing. 
With reservations you might read those of 
the late Robert Louis Stevenson and the late 
George Meredith who, if they paid no par- 
ticular attention to the architectonics of their 
novels or to the psychology of their characters 
— these being as a rule just as black and white 
as those to be found in the works of a Dickens 

79 



HENRY JAMES 

or a Reade — did at least pay some, if a quite 
mistaken, attention to the potential qualities 
of words. In a class quite apart as a serious 
and conscious artist the critic would have to 
place Mr. George Moore ; as a writer whose 
personality has great charm but whose works 
are not technically very interesting he would 
await the books of Mr. Thomas Hardy. And by 
themselves quite alone and above all others 
he would put the books of Mr. Joseph Conrad, 
Mr. W. H. Hudson and Mr. Henry James. 

I don't mean to say that this is by any 
means an exhaustive list. All that I am trying 
to point out is that, for the critic, there is 
some hope each year of finding a book or two 
of interest produced by a writer in the English 
language, a state of things that was impossible 
before the 90's. Nowadays we may expect 
in a novel, form and unaffected wording, 
which are the things that interest the critic, 
and some attempt at genuine characterisation, 
and subjects which have some connection 
with the real life of the day. They are, that is 
to say, an attempt at shadowing the real 
problems of the contact of individual with 
individual. And it is because he was by so far 
the earliest in the field, because his work is 
so immense in bulk, so various in subject and 
so intimately true to the life we lead, that Mr. 

80 



SUBJECTS 

James, in the most literal sense, is to-day in- 
comparable whether amongst novelists or 
historians. Mr. Hudson has a finer sense of 
words, Mr. Conrad is probably the more con- 
summate artist, in the sense that he is the 
greater poet and has paid more attention to 
technical details ; but his stories deal so much 
less intimately with the normal products of 
our day that, in this particular department, he 
scarcely comes. Oriental as he is, into com- 
parison with the great writer from the West. 
Mr. James' work with its immense number 
of characters so amazingly rendered, so skilfully 
and dispassionately dissected and laid bare, 
is the exact mirror of the world as he knows 
it — of the world as we all know it. It contains 
without doubt the rendering of many hard 
cases — ^there is the American of the book 
called The American ; there is the lion of The 
Death of the Lion; there is Madame Merle in 
The Portrait of a Lady ; there are the Colonel 
and his wife of The Real Thing ; there is 
Mr. Ruck of The Pension Beaurepas ; there is 
Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove; there 
are the dependants upon the old lady in 
that most wonderful of all stories called Europe. 
There are in fact no end to the sufferers 
amongst Mr. James' characters, and we may 
doubt whether, during the extent of its par- 
F 81 



HENRY JAMES 

ticular " affaire," the artist who fails to find 
employment for the two beautifully turned 
out figures in The Real Thing isn't as much 
to be commiserated for having them descend 
upon him and so nearly ruin his work, as are 
the Colonel and his wife who have to be sent 
away. And so it is through the whole range 
of this author's works. The normal novelist 
presents you with the oppressor and the 
oppressed. Mr. James presents you with the 
proposition, not so much that there are no 
such things as oppressors and oppressed, but 
that, even in the act of oppressing, the op- 
pressor isn't having a very much better time 
than his victims. He does not, that is to say, 
picture for you starvations, gaols, workhguse 
wards, and slave-drivers brandishing whips. 
That is not his business. His subjects in the 
end are selected instances of long chains of 
embarrassments, and his tragic note is rather 
that of the nightmare than of the murder. 
So that, when you consider the whole crowd 
of his characters, you have, as it were, an 
impression, giving a colour that is almost 
exactly the colour of the life we lead. I don't 
know exactly how many characters there are 
in the thirty or so o| volumes of fiction that 
Mr. James has given to the world, but, from 
Sir Jeoffrey Mandeville to Brooksmith the 

82 



SUBJECTS 

butler ; from Miss Bordereau of The Aspern 
Papers to little Miles of The Turn of the Screw ; 
from Mr. Searle of A Passionate Pilgrim to 
the young lady who was the post-office clerk 
and heroine of In the Cage — there must be a 
thousand or so of them. There must be, 
major and minor, about as many people as 
the average man or woman will have amongst 
their acquaintanceship, their friends figuring 
upon their calling list or merely as their 
dependants. You have them all : the American 
tourists, some quite nice French people with 
titles, an Italian prince or so, the butlers, the 
housekeepers, the tweenie maids, the author 
or two and the artist or two, the large crowd 
of people in comfortable circumstances, a few 
peers, rather more peeresses, some journalists, 
some divorcees, and some of those vague figures 
in the background who are in the background 
of everybody's life, and of every garden party. 
So that you have to imagine yourself in 
the very centre of the London season with its 
sense of an extraordinarily hurried but extra- 
ordinarily exciting rush through very peopled 
time, with its high skies, its boisterous winds, 
its ever present greenery of high trees and its 
equally ever present feeling that the end is 
approaching — that end which will see us all 
scattered from the moors to Silesia and from 

83 



HENRY JAMES 

Poitou to Rapallo, wherever our country 
homes or our chateaux may be. When, 
eventually, we get to those distant places, we 
shall have leisure to sit down and to reflect 
upon the season that is past and how, by it, 
we ourselves and everybody that we know will 
be affected in the season that is to come. 
But for the moment we are actually at one of 
the great garden-parties of the year. There 
is a band playing in the square ; the roadway 
is encumbered ; we hurry in because we have 
three other such places to go to in the course 
of the afternoon. But whilst we are waiting 
in the crowd of new arrivals for our names to 
be announced, we perceive Madame de Belle- 
garde talking to Milly Strether, whilst the 
Marquis gazes vacuously but still with a 
sinister expression at the conductor of the 
orchestra. Quite on the other side of the 
garden Newman is talking to Princess Casa- 
massima, for though he has lost Madame de 
Cintre — who a little outrageously went into 
a convent — and although he has settled in 
London, he can't get away altogether from 
the attraction of titled continentalism. The 
author of Beltraffio is proving extremely boring 
to Miss Kate Croy, who can't keep her eyes off 
Morton Densher. Densher is actually in no 
danger at all, since he is only asking the mature 

84 



SUBJECTS 

lady who writes as Greville Fane all about 
the plot of her next play. He doesn't, poor 
man, in the least want the knowledge, but he 
knows how to keep a conversation going. 
By one of those slips of an otherwise perfect 
social secretary both Beale Farange and the 
former Mrs. Farange had been invited to the 
same party, whereas Beale ought to have been 
asked to the one on the 4th and the lady to 
that given in honour of the poor dear Mahara- 
jah on the 18th. But there they are, the one 
with his immense golden beard beneath 
the tall plane tree in the middle of the square 
talking to Mrs. Assingham : not far behind 
whose back is that Prince of The Golden 
Bowl — you never can quite remember his 
name ; but you know perfectly well that he 
very much wants to ask her some question 
about the precise relationship of Mr. Verver 
with the household of Poynton — or was it 
Matcham ? Yes, certainly it must have been 
Matcham. The former Mrs. Farange, with her 
brilliant complexion, is being talked to by that 
American chap, a tired and rather boring 
enthusiast — you can't remember his name ; 
but he was the chap who tried to get hold of the 
Aspern Papers. You think he was even ready 
to marry the governess. It was something 
like that at any rate. The other American — 

85 



HENRY JAMES 

oh yes, his name is Winterbourne, and he 
failed to marry that rather crude young 
woman who died of Roman fever — Winterbourne 
is talking to Count von Vogelstein who now, 
with a harvest of ribbons, has retired from the 
Diplomatic Service — talking about the real 
motives of Bismarck in 1882. Just being 
introduced to the notice of your hostess is 
Lord Lambeth with Lady Lambeth, the very 
model of a British Peeress, though she was 
actually in a former state Miss Choate of 
Milwaukee. You see, Lord Lambeth had in 
the end to marry dollars, so that the Duchess 
might after all just as well have let him have 
Bessie Westgate. Miss Westgate married in 
in the end that fellow — you can't for the 
moment remember his name — who used to be 
always everywhere because he was under- 
stood to keep a diary, but who hasn't been so 
much about since his marriage. They never 
are. But, by Jove — what an immense party 
it is ! — how jolly well our host does do them 
when he takes it into his head to do them at 
all. There is Bessie Westgate, and there is 
Lord Lambeth, positively beaming straight 
down upon her with his friendly smile. We 
always liked her so much — and isn't she well 
preserved ! — we shouldn't wonder . . . such 
things do happen. . . . But no ! Mr. James 

86 



SUBJECTS 

wouldn't, at his party, have people who 
could by any possibility get into such a 
position. Of course the Beale Faranges are 
there, but they were both such very old friends. 
And then the incomparable Brooksmith is 
upon you with his automatic : " What name. 
Sir ? " and his equally inevitable : " Oh it's 
you. Sir." In answer to a just breathed 
question on your part, before he cries out your 
name, he answers discreetly : " No, Sir, Lady 
Barberina is not here yet. But Lady Agatha 
Longstraw and Miss Maisie are in the dining- 
room across the road. It's wonderful how 
Miss Maisie do come on, Sir. You'd find Mr. 
St. George in the dining-room too. Sir." 
The incomparable Brooksmith can allow him- 
self this moment of garrulity because your 
hostess is taking a minute or two to talk to 
Lady Wantridge about Scott Homer whom 
she hasn't seen for so many years. But 
Lady Wantridge goes, and you take your turn 
for a moment before the high lady whose 
relations with your host may be whatever 
they are ; Mr. James has at any rate deputed 
to her the task of receiving his thousand or so 
of guests. And having heard her say, " Oh, 
it's only you ; run, if you are capable of 
running, in the direction of Mrs. Medwin's 
pink sunshade which she certainly oughtn't, 

87 



HENRY JAMES 

poor lady, to hoist upon any such occasion. ..." 
You perceive quite close to the pink protec- 
tion in question the tall figure of Mrs. Verveine. 
Now how the deuce did Lady Euphemia know 
that there was anything between — if there 
possibly could in the most indefinite manner 
of speaking be said to be anything at all — 
between you and . . . ? But Lady Euphemia 
knows positively everything ; she can see, 
as it were, every one of the invisible cords that 
runs between every one of the obscure couples 
who so very obviously — so very carefully — 
don't talk to each other but do talk almost 
inevitably to somebody they don't in the 
least want to talk to. And, for just a moment, 
you have a sense of the immense strain, of 
the immense pull of all the cords that such a 
great London party means. You know to 
yourself, as she knows to herself, how all 
these people, beneath the high skies, amongst 
the high trees of the square, drowning with 
their not very loud voices the strains of the 
discreetest of orchestras, smiling, moving, 
appearing behind one group and disappearing 
into another, you know the strain that is 
upon them all, and the feeling that they all 
have that this great function is no more 
than an etape^ a stage in the journey towards 
an entire despair or towards a possible happi- 

88 



SUBJECTS 

ness, that is always in such a low and such a 
tantalising key. But you put the thought 
from you as you walk (and you are painfully 
aware that it will probably be for the last 
time !) openly towards the figure that is 
beside the too palpable sunshade. Yes, it 
will have to be the very last time that quite 
openly you display at a party a really visible 
interest in the lady who now smiles so frankly 
at you. For you feel, boring into your back 
or at the very least tickling between your 
shoulders. Lady Euphemia's glance. And you 
know perfectly well that if you don't take a 
great deal of trouble you and Mrs. Verveine 
will be popped alive into one of those elegant 
volumes each of which is decorated by a photo- 
graph of Mr. Alvin Coburn's. For, after all, 
we too know a thing or so about some people ; 
and don't we know that Lady Euphemia will 
tell every single thing that she observes to our 
distinguished host ; for isn't she just no more 
and no less than the lady who in New York 
refused to go down town and in London 
averts her gaze from the Law Courts — isn't 
she, incomparable gossip that she is, just no 
more and no less than Mr. James' Muse ? 

Anyhow, that, for what it is worth, is the 
exact impression caused by the reading, for a 

89 



HENRY JAMES 

matter of twenty-five years, the works of Mr. 
James. It is the effect of an immense concourse 
of real people, whose histories we just dimly 
remember to have heard something about ; 
whose figures we just dimly remember to have 
knocked up against here and there. Real ! 
why they are just as exactly real as anybody 
we have ever met. The fictitious Prince von 
Vogelstein is just as actual a person to us as 
Prince von Metternich who was at the German 
Embassy only the other day, and Milly Strether 
is just as real as the poor dear little American 
cousin Hattina who faded away out of life 
twenty years or so ago. Nay, I will do the 
most profound, as it is the most humiliating 
homage, for what it is worth, that one novelist 
can make to another. On re-reading this 
morning, after an interval of perhaps twenty- 
five years. The American, I find that I have 
introduced, almost exactly as he stands in that 
book, one of Mr. James' characters into one of 
my own novels, written five years ago. You 
see, I first read The American during a period 
of my boyhood that was passed very largely 
in Paris, and very largely in exactly the same 
society as that in which Newman himself 
moved. And having read the book at the 
same time I really, twenty years after, thought 
that Valentin de Bellegarde was a young man 

90 



SUBJECTS 

that I had met somewhere in the society of 
the Blounts, the Goulds, the Uzes, the Saint 
Mam^ices, and the rest of that Anglo-Saxon 
society which was then beginning to touch 
hands with the dwellers behind the tall and 
silent porticos of the Faubourg St. Germain. 
Yes, indeed I thought that Valentin was one 
of my own connections whom I had liked very 
much. And so I considered myself perfectly 
justified in lifting his figure, with such adorn- 
ments and changes as should suit my own 
purpose, into one of my own novels. 



91 



Ill 

TE^MPERAMENTS 

When an English firm, A, has occasion to 
write to an EngHsh firm, B, that Messrs B's 
representative has called upon them with an 
offer that does not seem attractive, they 
make the announcement in very much the 
same terms as those I have used. The American 
mind, however, is much more prone to alle- 
gorical or at least to figurative speech. Mr. A. 
meeting Mr. B. upon Broadway and narrating 
the incident would remark something like : 
"Your Mr. X. drifted in yesterday with a pro- 
position ; but we haven't no use for corner 
lots and battlefields, so we handed him a 
lemon and he quit." 

The Englishman, in short, is almost incapable 
of calling a spade and spade. His language 
forbids it as well as his sense of caution. The 
American, on the other hand, making a virtue 
of the necessities of our common tongue 
luxuriates in a riotous symbolism. The Eng- 

92 



TEMPERAMENTS 

lishman falls back upon cliche phrases, the 
American soars into dizzy heights of inventive 
phraseology. So that, where the ordinary 
Englishman would write that Keats or Gautier 
lived always in the hope of writing " some- 
thing that would pay," the extraordinary 
American — and after all it is only extraordinary 
Americans that will waste their time on 
anything so unprofitable as writing ! — the 
extraordinary American will write of the aspira- 
tion in question as a " hope of successfully 
growing in his temperate garden some specimen 
of the rank exotic whose leaves are rustling 
cheques." And this is a very fine way of 
putting it, representing, as our distinguished 
subject might well say, one beat of the extended 
pinions that carried him so high in (as it 
were) the empyrean, and so far (as we all 
know) over the vast territory of the human 
heart. And let it be pointed out that this 
characteristic — which is, as I have said, a 
boldness growing out of a national shrinking — 
this characteristic is much more a part of the 
spirit of adolescent America than of ancient 
New England. Mr. James in fact began life 
in what he would call the last mentioned 
parages. And, having lived nearly all his life 
at a distance, his ear nevertheless has never 
done anything else but listen, amidst all the 

93 



HENRY JAMES 

intermediate sounds, for any breath from that 
enormous Child. For if, physically, there have 
been few worse Americans, in the ^spirit 
there has not been a single better one. It is 
quite easy, in fact, to imagine Mr. James 
saying in the street of an English country 
town : "I think I observe a compatriot ; 
let us go into this shop"; and into the shop 
we may very well imagine him forthwith 
bolting to avoid the contact. But this is far 
more Mr. James' tribute to Mr. James' own 
mental pose, one suspects, than his real desire. 
He doesn't, one imagines, in the least want 
personally to avoid anybody, even if they 
come from Falls River, New Jersey. The 
desire of his heart is to hear what they are 
doing in, or still more what they are doing 
to, Washington Square. He has longed, during 
all his residence in the Eastern world — he 
has longed as only the expatriated can long, 
for the latest news of General H. P. Packard, 
Miss Kitty L. Upjohn and Mr. P. C. Hatch, 
all of Brooklyn, N.Y. 

But it has been necessary for Mr. James' 
immense process of refining himself, that he 
should keep away from the manifestations of 
the uncontrollable, and so very high-voiced. 
West. I have said earlier in this little study, 
that Mr. James has had no public mission in 

94 



TEMPERAMENTS 

life. But that is only a half truth, if it is not 
an absolute lie. For, during the whole seventy 
years of his life which began in New England 
in 1^43, -Mi:. James has had just one 
immense mission — the civilising of America. 
New England presented our subject with 
glimpses of what a civilisation might be. 
But you have only got to go to New England 
to-day to realise all that New England hadn't 
got, in those days, in the way of civilisation. 
You have only got to go to Concord, Massa- 
chusetts with its dust, its heat, its hard 
climate, its squalid frame houses, its mosquitoes, 
to realise how little, on the luxurious and 
leisured side of existence, New England had 
to offer to a searcher after a refined, a 
sybaritic civilisation. 

I am not saying that there wasn't, between 
Salem and Boston, enough intellectual develop- 
ment to provide a non-materialistic state 
with fifty civilisations. It is obvious that 
you could not have produced an Emerson, 
a Holmes, a Thoreau or a Hawthorne — or 
for the matter of that a Washington Irving — 
without having a morally, an intellectually and 
even a socially refined atmosphere. Hamp- 
stead itself could not more carefully weigh 
its words or analyse its actions. But it 
would be fairly safe to say that, except for 

95 



HENRY JAMES 

some few specimens of " Colonial " ware and 
architectm^e you wouldn't in the 60's have 
found in the whole of New England a single 
article of what is called vertu. If you will 
look at the photograph which forms the 
frontispiece of The Spoils of Poynton, in Mr. 
James' collected edition, you will see the 
sort of civilisation for which Mr. James 
must obviously have craved and which 
New England certainly couldn't have pro- 
duced. 

I must confess that I myself should be ap- 
palled at having to live before such a mantel- 
piece and such a decor — all this French gilding 
of the Louis Quinze period ; all these cupids 
^> surmounting florid clocks ; these vases with 
intaglios ; these huge and floridly patterned 
walls ; these tapestried fire-screens ; these 
gilt chairs with backs and seats of Gobelins, 
of Aubusson, or of petit point. But there is no 
denying the value, the rarity and the sug- 
gestion of these articles which are described 
as " some of the spoils " — ^the suggestion of 
tranquillity, of an aged civilisation, of wealth, 
of leisure, of opulent refinement. And there 
is no denying that not by any conceivable im- 
agination could such a mantelpiece with such 
furnishings have been found at Brook Farm. 
It was in search of these things that 

96 



TEMPERAMENTS 

Mr. James travelled, as he so frequently 
did, to Florence where palazzi, and all that 
palazzi may hold, were so ready of access, 
so easy of conquest for the refined Trans- 
atlantic. In various flashes, in various ob- 
scurities, hints, concealments, reservations and 
reported speeches, Mr. James has set us the task 
of piecing together a history of his tempera- 
ment. The materials for this history are con- 
tained in various volumes. There is, for 
instance, his very last production, A Small Boy ; 
there are the prefaces to the volumes of his 
collected editions ; there are his compara- 
tively scanty collections of criticisms, the 
most important of which are contained in the 
volume called French Poets and Novelists; 
there is the life of Hawthorne ; there are the 
books about places such as A Little Tour in 
Fra?ice, English Hours, and The American 
Scene, It is therefore to these works that I 
shall devote my consideration for the space of 
this section. 

A Small Boy, which is a touching tribute to 
the memory of our subject's brother, adum- 
brates the existence, mostly in the state of 
New York, of a young male child — of two 
young male children in a household of the 
most eminent and of the most cultivated. As 
far as one can make the matter out — as far, 
G 97 



> 



HENRY JAMES 

that is to say, as it is necessary to make it 
out for a work which is in no sense biographical 
— Mr. James' father, Henry James senior, 
was a person of great cultural position in 
what is now called the Empire State. He was 
not so much a representative citizen as a 
public adornment. He was occupied in the 
something like the reconciling of revealed 
religion with science, which was then be- 
ginning to adopt the semblance of a destroyer 
of Christianity. His published works were 
numerous ; his eloquence renowned ; his re- 
finement undoubted. For the matter of that 
it was demonstrable, so that we have the 
image of two small boys, whether in the 
clean, white-porticoed streets of Buffalo or 
of Albany, or in the comparative rough-and- 
tumble and noise of a yellow-painted New 
York that contained nevertheless at that date 
gardens and>pleasaunces. We have the im- 
pression of these two small boys of the 50's, 
pursuing a perhaps not very strenuous, but 
certainly a very selected, educational path 
towards that stage in which William James 
displayed all the faculty of analysis of a 
novelist, and Mr. Henry James all the faculties 
;Of analysis of a pragmatic philosopher. 

And there is no doubt that there were 
afforded to the quite young James — the small 

98 



TEMPERAMENTS 

boy — a quite unusual number of contacts 
with quite the best people. Figuratively- 
speaking, not only did this particular small 
boy live amongst the placid eccentrics of 
New England but, in his father's house, he 
was exposed to the full tide that, running 
counter to the Gulf stream, from quite early days 
of the Victorian age, bathed the shores of the 
Western World — the tide, I mean, of Euro- 
pean celebrities. I am not, of course, writing 
^ history of American culture — though indeed 
h history of Mr. James' mind might well be 
^hothing more nor less than that ; but a very 
interesting subject lies open for some analyst 
in recording the impressions and adventures 
of the early tourists who entered on the 
formidable task of visiting, lecturing in, or, in 
whatever other intellectual way, exploiting 
the States of before the War. You will find 
traces of them in The Mississippi Pilot of 
Mark Twain where the formidable author 
tomahawks Mrs. Trollope, and several French 
and English writers who, having visited 
that gigantic but uninteresting and desolate 
stream, failed of seeing its snags and bluffs 
and steamer saloons eye to eye with Mr. 
Clemens. You will read the actual impressions 
of such a visit in Martin Chuzzlewit and in 
American Notes ; or, in later American Memoirs 

99 



HENRY JAMES 

you will read of the disappointment caused 
to distinguished hearers by Matthew Arnold's 
faulty delivery of his lectures — his mumbling 
voice, his frigid, English mannerisms. (How, 
alas, one sympathises with the unfortunate 
author of The Forsaken Merman !) 

At any rate, lecturing and acclaimed, or 
lecturing and appalled, and in either case 
overwhelmed by that immense and blinding 
thing, the world-famed American Hospitality 
— they came, those pilgrims, in a steady 
trickle. And it passed, that trickle, through 
the house of Mr. Henry James, Senr., under 
the no doubt observant eyes of Henry James, 
Junr. It is not my business to particularise 
who they exactly were — those great figures. 
In order to catalogue them, I should have 
to fall back on the record of conversations 
with our subject ; and although I should un- 
scrupulously resort to this, if it suited my turn, 
it simply does not. It suffices to say that, 
whatever may have been our subject's personal 
contacts with Dickens, Thackeray, Arnold or 
any other English celebrity to whom Henry 
James, Senr., offered his fine hospitality, nothing 
of their personalities " rubbed off," as you 
might say, on to the by then adolescent 
James — or, if anything came at all it was only 
from the restrained muse of Matthew Arnold, 

100 



TEMPERAMENTS 

whose temperament, in its rarefied way, was as 
" New England " as was ever that of Emerson 
or James Russell Lowell. 

To this coloured and contemplative child- 
hood — I at least cannot discern in it any 
traces of physical activities even so violent 
as might be implied in the record of a game 
of baseball — there succeeded an educational 
pilgrimage to countries upon the eastern 
verges of the Atlantic. Mr. James, that is to 
say, studied one of the more non-committal 
subjects — law, or it may have been philo- 
sophy — at a rather non-committal Swiss Uni- 
versity. I use the phrase " non-committal," 
because it seems to me so very adequately 
to express the institution itself, and not only 
that, but its whole influence upon the career 
of Mr. James. For, if our subject's Mater 
had been Alma instead of Respectabilissima, 
how different might not have been Mr. James' 
range of subjects, though nothing, I imagine, 
would have made much difference to his 
temper. I mean that, if, instead of studying 
law at Geneva, Mr. James had " taken " 
the humaner letters at Oxford, Bonn, Heidel- 
berg, Jena or even Paris, he might have 
given us a picture of life much different, 
though his sense of the value of what goes 
to make up this troublesome career that, 

101 



HENRY JAMES 

somehow, we must get through, might have 
remained much the same. 

It is not only along the lines of classicism. 
Classicism, it is true, has quite extraordinarily 
little part in Mr. James' pages. It is not, again, 
only that you will not find almost no mention 
in all the works (from Roderick Hudson to The 
Filler Grain), of Diana, Pasiphse, Diodorus 
Siculus, Theocritus, or even of a writer whom, 
if he had ever mentioned him, Mr. James would 
certainly have called " poor dear old Euri- 
pides." ... It is not, however, only that ; 
it is that, right up to The Golden Bowl, in all 
the writings you will discern no trace of the 
Latin or Greek classical spirit. (I do not mean 
to say that there is no trace of classicality in 
all these singular and impressive works. It is, 
however, a Puritan classicism of a totally 
different genus.) But, even in The Golden 
Bowl, which we may regard as containing the 
maturest fruits of our subject's ripe philosophy, 
we have the singular remark that the banks 
of the Thames seemed, for the Roman prince, 
to have much more of the atmosphere of 
Imperial Rome than the banks of Rome's 
Tiber. And the singularity of this remark lies 
in attributing this imperialism not to the 
peoples but to the places. 

God knows, the gentlemen who are re- 

102 



TEMPERAMENTS 

sponsible for the Embankment may be, im- 
perially, more akin to those who built the 
baths of Caracalla than the monsters who were 
responsible for the modern bridge in front of 
the Castle of St. Angelo — as who should say 
that the spirit of the British Empire is more 
imperially Roman than that of the Kingdom 
of Italy. But even that comparison is singu- 
larly superficial. 

I am of course wxll aware that our subject, 
in his careful impersonality, inserts that view 
of the Embankment into the psychology of a 
modern Roman prince ; so that he may well 
retort that that view does not in any sense 
represent his particular picture. But the 
whole spirit of his w^orks speaks in that direc- 
tion with no uncertain voice, and I cannot 
recall in any of his books of travel any directly 
countervailing pronouncement. It is, indeed, 
there, always a question of regions Caesar never 
knew — in the spirit, though in the flesh he 
may well have there erected monuments. 

Mr. James' is, in fact, a purely Protestant 
and a purely non-historic personality. (I am 
aware that I write a little as a black Papist and, 
for what it is worth, a Tory mad about historic 
continuity.) No one else could have placed 
a marble mantelpiece (it is one of Mr. James' 
rare betrayals of himself, that photograph !) 

103 



HENRY JAMES 

in a perfect specimen of a Jacobean manor 
house, and have invested the mantelpiece with 
such a veritable Jesuit's altar of gilding. They 
could not have done it and have called the 
results satisfactory to anybody but a collector. 

But God forbid that I should be taken as 
grumbling at Mr. James for having so little, 
or for having none at all, of the historic sense ; 
for being so purely modern and so purely 
Protestant a product. His rendering, for 
instance, of Carcassonne, in A Little Tour in 
France, is archaeologically inferior to any one- 
franc guide's ; but in its nice appreciation of 
surfaces and of forms it can do more for any 
visitor from Ilion, N.Y., or from Campden 
Hill, W. — than anything written by the hand 
of man about Carcassonne or any other place. 

So the entire appropriateness of the " re- 
spectable " University on the banks of the 
lake as a place of study for the adolescent, 
contemplative and refined New Englander, 
shines out. At Oxford he might have studied 
the niceties of the enclytic ^e in the Greek 
Testaments ; but he was so little of a school- 
man that it would have done little for him. 
At Goettingen he might well have " taken his 
doctor " with a thesis upon verbal emenda- 
tions in the various texts of Strabo ; but I 
cannot think that the spiritual geography of 

104 



.# 



TEMPERAMENTS 

A Passionate Pilgrim would have been im- 
proved by the exercise. At Oxford, again, 
sociable soul as his writings bespeak him, he 
must have come as much into the social tone 
of the place as to have worn a rough pilot coat 
with huge buttons and to have acquired the 
art of driving a four-in-hand along the 
Trumpington turnpike [I know that that is 
" Cambridge "] ; at Jena, still sociable, he 
would have worn the high jackboots and dress 
sword of a chargierter and would have poured, 
as the habit there is, libations of beer over the 
bronze statue of the supposedly thirsty pious 
founder. But here again, I cannot imagine 
that the young James would much have 
enjoyed these activities ; neither would his 
books much have benefited. It is possible 
that into his views of English spreading lawns 
with decorative and highly intellectualised 
house-parties, strolling, seated, and always 
conversing upon them, he might have intro- 
duced figures engaged in pursuits more active, 
involving pellets more mobile than the purely 
conversational ones. But no pictures of 
country-house pursuits as they really are, no 
minute analyses of tennis, bridge, shooting or 
what you will could have atoned for a potential 
loss to the handling of what after all are Mr. 
James' true '' subjects." No, in this, rather 

105 



HENRY JAMES 

mutedly, best of all possible worlds ; dominated 
by a blind Destiny Who nevertheless has a 
decent, almost a New England sense of the fit- 
ness of things, or at any rate of appropriateness 
— (so that if this particular Destiny does not 
move in any particularly mysterious way His 
wonders to perform, He at any rate sees that 
sobriety, continence and a general riding of 
the passions on the curb are rewarded by 
prosperity, the society of country-houses and 
the other things — still rather mutedly — worth 
having) ; in this particular best of all possible 
worlds the best of all possible Universities for 
our distinguished subject would certainly be 
Genf. 

And I allow myself to discover in Mr. James, 
even at the latest epoch, a trace of — I w^on't 
say of affection, for the word would be ill- 
applied to this University that is Mater, not 
Alma, but Respectabilissima — a trace of re- 
membrance of the respectability of this haunt 
of his contemplative youth. In the first 
version of Daisy Miller Mr. James lets his hero, 
Winterbourne, sit upon a terrace and look at a 
quite indefinite building that is Geneva Uni- 
versity. But, returning to this story in 1909 — 
it was first conceived in 1877 — Mr. James 
obviously felt the necessity of trea^ting his 
elderly Mater more respectfully and even more 

106 



TEMPERAMENTS 

tenderly. Therefore into the midst of his early 
and dispassionate sentence he interpolates the 
words : " the grey old ' Academy ' on the 
steep and stony hill-side," thus claiming for 
his early place of education, product as it was 
of Calvinism, the hue and the quality of any 
city of dreaming spires, home of lost causes, 
and product — for in the end you cannot get 
away from it — of Papists who loved learning. 

Balzac we mav take to have been our 
subject's first serious literary model — or at any 
rate his first conscious one ; and it is interesting 
to consider how, at any rate on the surface, 
in their late flowering and in their determina- 
tion to produce contemporary history, the 
voluminous author of the series of fairy tales 
called the Comedie Humaine and the author of 
the series of stories about worries and pertur- 
bations resembled each other. 

Balzac, I learn from the pages of Mr. James' 
early study of his work — for I have never been 
able to take sufficient interest in any other 
of Balzac's manifestations than the Contes 
Drolatiques to study very carefully his bio- 
graphy or his bibliography — Balzac " before 
he was thirty years old, had published, under 
a variety of pseudonyms, some twenty long 
novels, veritable Grub Street productions, 
written in sordid Paris attics, in poverty, in 

107 



HENRY JAMES 

perfect obscurity. No writer ever served a 
more severe apprenticeship to his art, or 
lingered more hopelessly at the ladder base 
of fame."^ . . . And if Mr. James, up till this 
very month in which I am writing, had not 
continued to manifest what is almost a rever- 
ence for Balzac, I should strongly have sus- 
pected him of writing those two sentences with 
his tongue in his cheek. For it is impossible 
seriously to consider that the turning out of 
twenty veritable Grub Street productions can 
be deemed — whatever else you choose to call it 
— an apprenticeship. At any rate, " before he 
was thirty years old," Mr. James had published 
to all intents and purposes nothing. That is 
to say, he had put out, firstly in the pages of 
a magazine and then in book form, a Balzac- 
Dickensian trifle called Watch and Ward, and 
in one of his prefaces he seems to hint that he 
published, here and there, various more or 
less fugitive trifles, before he had reached the 
fatal age for poets. And the first of his w^orks 
that he himself cares to rescue from oblivion — 
and we are dealing now only with the figure 
of himself that he cares to present to us — is 
Roderick Hudson, which was begun in Florence 
in 1874 (Mr. James being then thirty-one) and 
finished in New York, in East 25th Street. 

^ French Poets and Xove/isL: AJacmillaii, 188^. 

108 



/ 



TEMPERAMENTS 

Again, from the Prefaces to the Collected 
Edition, we may gather that from twenty to 
thirty years of age our subject led, from one 
continental and English town to another, a 
drifting existence of hotels and of hospitality. 
They were, these visits, tempered with occa- 
sional returns across the water, in, as again we 
may gather, the rather desultory attempt to 
" take up " whatever profession it was for 
which his studies at Geneva had more or less 
qualified him. But, to all intents and purposes, 
our subject led what Catholics call the Con- 
templative Life, as severely withdrawn from 
the things of this world as any religious. So 
much at least we may assuredly lay down 
from the long passage I have already quoted 
relative to the attempts he made to induce his 
Muse to trot down town. And although the 
society of French cooks, governesses and the 
mistresses of drawing-rooms may strike one as, 
at first glance, a queer substitute for that of 
priors, sub-priors, almoners and primers, it is 
none the less, in a Puritan world given to 
attaching its greatest interests to the takings 
of railways, a substitute. It w^as, that gigantic 
up town cloister, at least a milieu in which, 
if you did not very much study the Sweet 
and Divine Nature, you had ample opportu- 
nity for studying all human manifestations — 

109 



HENRY JAMES 

at any rate, all that were separable from the 
acquisition of railway interests. 

So that, in Florence, in London, in Paris, at 
Kew Gardens, Hampton Court, in haunts of 
ancient peace, show places and in New York, 
the states of Connecticut, Rhode Island and 
Massachusetts, we may imagine our distin- 
guished subject, pursuing a modernly monachaH^ 
life, tempered by the writing for the magazines 
of fugitive articles. He had, that is to say, 
secured his opening for delicate, temperate and 
contemplative prose in periodicals of the 
dignified and older order. We imagine him 
" sending in " papers on Florence, Kew 
Gardens, Hampton Court, the haunts, and 
upon any other places where the turf was 
smooth, the deer meditated beneath oaks and 
the sunlight lay upon mellow walls. There can 
be no doubt, when it comes to the reading of 
that touching — that yearning — story, A Pas- 
sionate Pilgrim, that was published in 1875, 
there can be no doubt that our author had 
'' tried his hand," had precisely served an 
apprenticeship of a full ten years, to what is 
called descriptive writing. For A Passionate 
Pilgrim is the apotheosis of the turf, the deer, 
the oak trees, the terraces of manor houses. 
It had never been so " done " before and never 
again will it be so done. 

110 



TEMPERAMENTS 

Roderick Hudson, look at it how you 
will, is, in the scale of our author's work, the 
final example of 'prentice work ; A Passionate 
Pilgrim is the first masterpiece. Up till the 
year 1874 Mr. James was indeed serving an 
apprenticeship ; not the apprenticeship of 
turning out twenty Grub Street novels, but 
that real apprenticeship of living, observing, 
and occasionally trying his hand at a paper of 
prose for the older magazines. Mr. James, 
in the New York of that day, was already 
known as a personality not only of pro- 
mise but of the certainty of performance. We 
might gather that — if we did not know it from 
the conversations of the master's early friends 
— from the statement in the Preface that 
Roderick Hudson was designed from the first 
for publication in The Atlantic Monthly. Of 
course an author might destine his work for 
The Atlantic Monthly — or for The Entomo- 
logical Review — and the editors of those 
periodicals might turn it down. But Roderick 
Hudson actually began its serial publication 
before the story was complete, and it needs 
very little knowledge of the sapient editors of 
the older magazines — as of the newer, for that 
matter — to perceive that they would not 
" commission a serial " from a " hand " en- 
tirely untried. Here then is proof positive 

111 



HENRY JAMES 

that in one magazine or another there must 
exist a considerable body of early work by 
our author. I am however so little — I conceive 
— concerned with it that I leave to some future 
aspirant for a literary doctorate the task of 
disinterring these prehistoric papers and, upon 
them, founding a thesis. 

The fact is that Roderick Hudson gives so 
very completely the measure of the " earliest 
James." For oiu^ author was never a very 
exclusive artist in words — an artist, that is to 
say, in the sense that Flaubert and M. Anatole 
France are artists. Neither until after — until 
long after — he had written Roderick Hudson 
did our author become a master of plot, story, 
and motive, though his sense of form was 
always notable. Even until he had written 
The Portrait of a Lady, in 1879, we find that, 
if he did not think it essential to have villainous 
characters and heroic, oppressors and op- 
pressed, he found it at least highly convenient 
— thus vou have the real villains, and mur- 
derers at that, in The American, and the 
villainous husband of the oppressed heroine of 
the Portrait — the villainous husband having 
by the still more designing Mme. Merle a real, 
tangible, illegitimate child. 

That of course is Balzac — Madame de Belle- 
garde is Balzac — a wicked Balzac duchess. 

112 



> 



TEMPERAMENTS 

Madame Merle is improved Balzac — a Balzac 
adventuress brought a little nearer to the 
ground and a little rendered Anglo-Saxon. 

In the Preface to Roderick Hudson we find, 
indeed, Mr. James at his confessions : — 

To name a place in fiction is to pretend in some 
degree to represent it. ... I had not preterided very 
much to ''do " Northampton, Mass. ... It was a 
peaceful, rural New England community, qiielconqiie 
— it was not, it was under no necessity of being, 
Northampton, Mass. But one nestled, technically, in 
those days, in the great shadow of Balzac. . . . 
Balzac talked of Nemours and Provins : therefore why 
shouldn't one, with fond fatuity, talk of almost the 
only small American ville de province of which one 
had happened to lay up, long before, a pleased vision ? 

Or again : — 

The greater complexity, the superior truth (of the 
subject) was all more or less present to me ; only the 
question was, too dreadfully, how to make it present 
to the reader ? How boil down so many facts in the 
alembic, so that the distilled result, the produced 
appearance, should have intensity, brevity, lucidity, 
beauty, all the merits required for my effect ? How ? 
when it was already so difficult, as I found, to proceed 
even as I was proceeding ? It did not help, alas, it 
only maddened, to remember that Balzac would have 
known how, and would have asked no additional 
credit for it. . . . 

H 113 



HENRY JAMES 

Thus you see how very explicitly Roderick 
Hudson was a piece of 'prentice work — that 
piece, as it were, that the apprentice offers to 
the attention of the world to show that he is 
ready to become, if not already a master, at 
least a very efficient journeyman. Indeed, in 
that latter passage, you may observe the 
apprentice is already beginning to discern that 
his master is, at any rate in certain aspects, if 
not wholly an amateur, at least a faulty 
practitioner. For, if Mr. James at that early 
age was maddened to remember that Balzac, 
with what is no more than a trick, would have 
turned the corner of the complexities of a given 
subject or of life, he must have been beginning 
to discern already the fact that Balzac, what- 
ever else he may have been, was not in the 
least complex. He was, that is to say, on the 
way to make the discovery that he gave to 
the world ten years later — the fact that, in 
matters of the subtler contacts, Balzac was no 
more than the quack doctor at the fair of life. 
Or, to put the matter in Mr. James' own 
phrase^: — 

This makes, it is true, rather a bald statement of a 

matter which at times seems more considerable ; 

but it may be maintained that an exact analysis of 

his heterogeneous opinions will leave no more 

French Poets and Novelists. 1884. 

114 




TEMPERAMENTS 

palpable deposit. His imagination was so constant, 
his curiosity and ingenuity so unlimited, the energy 
of his phrase so striking, he raises such a cloud of 
dust about him as he goes, that the reader to whom 
he is new has a sense of his opening up gulfs and 
vistas of thought and pouring forth flashes and 
volleys of wisdom. But from the moment that he 
ceases to be a simple dramatist Balzac is an arrant 
charlatan. . . . 

It is then no wonder that the young James, 
who was beginning to have visions of com- 
plexity and to have desires to cease being " a 
simple dramatist," should have found in his 
master little of a guide to his new develop- 
ments. He had, in fact, with this book a 
sense of embarcation — a sense of embarcation 
into those seas in which, if the voyager finds 
no other pearl, he finds at least the uncharted 
land ; there, if again he is to survive his 
travellings, he must take life and his subject 
and humanity with its complexities, at least 
seriously. " He embarks, rash adventurer " — 
I am quoting the Preface again — " under the 
star of ' representation,' and is pledged thereby 
to remember that the art of interesting us in 
things . . . can only be the art of representing 
them. ..." 

It was at this point, then, that the tempera- 
ment of our subject took its definite leave of 

115 



HENRY JAMES 

the 'prentice frame of mind as well as of its 
subjection to Balzac. We find him, of course, 
writing in 1884, " the attempt," of the Comedie 
Humaine, "was, as Balzac himself has happily 
expressed it, to faire concurrence a Vetat civil — 
to start an opposition, as we should say in 
America, to the civil registers." And Mr. James' 
self-consciousness being of so high an order, 
one has little hesitation in saying that he too 
must by 1884 have formed the design of 
rivalling the Blue Books. He began probably 
with no such settled ambition — but then so 
did Balzac ; it is part of the remarkable, 
superficial parallel. " We know not how early 
Balzac formed the plan of the Comedie 
Humaine ; but the general preface, in which 
he explains the unity of his work and sets forth 
that each of his tales is a block in a single 
immense edifice and that this edifice aims to 
be a complete portrait of the civilisation of his 
time — this remarkable edifice dates from 1842. 
(If we call it remarkable, it is not that we 
understand it ; though so much as we have 
expressed may be easily gathered from it. . . .)" 
Isn't that passage — with its reference to 
difficulties of comprehension of his hero's 
preface, exactly what anyone writing of Mr. 
James, his works and his Prefaces — above all 
of his bewildering Prefaces — might set down ? 

116 



TEMPERAMENTS 

But, by 1884, our subject had very obviously 
arrived at a pretty precise valuation of the 
pretensions of the master — of the shallow 
places in his knowledge — of his absolute want 
of any knowledge whatever. " He began very 
early to write about countesses and duchesses ; 
and even after he had become famous the 
manner in which he usually portrays the 
denizens of the Faubourg St. Germain obliges 
us to believe that the place they occupy in his 
books is larger than any they occupied in his 
experience. Did he go into society ? did he 
observe manners from a standpoint that com- 
manded the field ? It was not till he became 
famous that he began to use the aristocratic 
prefix; in his earlier years he was plain M. 
Balzac." ..." There is nothing to prove 
that he in the least ' realised,' as we say, the 
existence of England and Germany. That he had 
of course a complete theory of the British 
constitution and the German intellect makes 
little difference ; for Balzac's theories were 
often in direct proportion to his ignorance. ..." 
. . . "If, instead of committing to paper 
impossible imaginary tales, he could have stood 
for a while in some other relation to society 
about him than that of a scribbler, it would 
have been a great gain. The great general 
defect of his manner, as we shall see, is the 

117 



HENRY JAMES 

absence of fresh air, of the trace of disinterested 
observation ; he had from his earhest years, 
to carry out our metaphor, an eye to the 
shop. ..." I do not know that any more 
complete blowing to pieces of a revered master 
was ever perpetrated by the hand of man. 

The fact is that Balzac was as complete a 
writer of fairy tales as the Brothers Grimm, 
Hans Christian Andersen or Brentano of the 
Hundred Soups, and, in the main, his financiers, 
duchesses and the rest, have no more relation 
to life — have much less relation to the life of 
1850 — than any adventurous tailor, bewitched 
charcoal burner or Rapunzel. The Comedie 
Humaine, except for Cesar Birotteau, the 
Napoleon of perfumery, and for Pere Goriot, 
the Lear of 1840 Paris, is a gigantic deception. 
Balzac had a certain — an even very intimate — 
knowledge of the Parisian lower middle class, 
of smaller money-lenders, of the lower ranks 
of churchmen ; and, had he limited his pro- 
jections to these, his works would have had 
some value apart from whatever value may 
attach to fairy tales. In a sense he had some 
of the value of the pioneer ; he diml}^ per- 
ceived how the art of the writer of fiction 
might be redeemed from the slur that had been 
cast upon it by the very defects of which he 
possessed so liberal a share. And just as 

118 



TEMPERAMENTS 

Dickens, Thackeray and Fielding attempted 
to dignify their profession by appearing in the 
robe of the preacher, so Balzac, selecting the 
more valuable pretext — being by far the wiser 
charlatan — pretended to be at once a realist 
and a philosopher. Had he done what he 
pretended to do he would have been the most 
immense — as he was certainly the most in- 
dustrious — figure of the modern world. But 
the fact is that, though he had got hold of a 
tremendous idea — an idea as tremendous as 
that of the railway, the electric telegraph, the 
Crystal Palace or the aeroplane — he w^as utterly 
without either the technical knowledge or the 
knowledge of humanity that would have carried 
it out. He knew less of either than Dickens, 
less than Fielding, much less than Thackeray, 
and he knew infinitely less than Smollett whom 
in many ways he resembled. But, if to all 
intents and purposes he succeeded not at all, 
he was of this inestimable service to humanity : 
he handed on to later writers that one great 
idea of their functions, the aspiration to faire 
concurrence a Vetat civil — to beat the Blue 
Book out of the field. 

And the first of all writers — the first at any 
rate of writers in the Anglo-Saxon tongue — to 
take advantage of this particular lesson of the 
master was our author. Let us consider what 

119 



HENRY JAMES 

were Mr. James' advantages. Perhaps the 
first of these was that at an early age he had 
read the Hne of Musset's : " Mon verre n'est 
pas grand mais je bois dans mon verre " ; 
perhaps the second was that he was a citizen 
of the United States. 

As regards the size of Mr. James' glass, I 
have said almost sufficient. It was bounded 
upon the one hand by his own temperament, 
on the other by the human heart, and those 
seem to me to be bounds sufficient for any 
ordinary writer. I was talking the other day 
to an active and intelligent Englishman — one 
of His Majesty's ministers — upon this very 
subject. He brought forward as a damning 
indictment of our subject the fact that Mr. 
James in none of his works deals with Politics, 
War, the Lower Classes or Religion — with any 
of the things that are properly written with 
capital letters. I suppose that it is a sufficient 
answer — not to report a desultory conversation 
— to say that Mr. James knows nothing of 
Politics, War, or the Lower Classes. Nobody 
does. Nowadays all these things are so much 
in the melting-pot of confficting theories that 
for anyone to dogmatise upon what would be 
the outcome of, say, a war between Prussia 
and France ; upon where the Liberal or any 
other party will be in ten years' time ; or how 

120 



TEMPERAMENTS 

fittingly to deal with the Lower Classes — to 
dogmatise upon any of these themes that will 
so very efficiently settle themselves without 
any of our talking would be to write oneself 
down an ass indeed. It is true that that con- 
sideration will never hinder from doing so, my- 
self or any other novelist, writer of leading 
articles, or pamphleteer. But it has hindered 
Mr. James, who is a w4se man and who had the 
horrible example of Honore de Balzac very 
much before his eyes in early life. As to 
Religion, that, in Protestant communities, is as 
it should be, very much in the melting-pot too. 
Mr. James, regarding the matter from an 
individualist standpoint, as all introspective 
Puritans must do, never really has it out of his 
mind. In so far as every one of his books turns 
upon an ethical point he may — in a Protestant 
community where ethics is so large a propor- 
tion and dogma so little, of Religion — be 
regarded as a purely religious writer. Indeed, 
occasionally, in such stories as The Altar of the 
Dead, The Great Good Place or The Turn of the 
Screw, he has permitted himself what he calls 
" indiscretions " — which implies that he has 
written stories that propagandise in favour of 
his particular interpretation of the Infinite. 

But apart from these very few candidly 
labelled indiscretions, Mr. James has never 

121 



HENRY JAMES 

committed the sin of writing what he "wanted " 
to write. For, if you ever chance to make, to 
an Enghsh novehst, any objections to parts 
of his work — to the way in which he has ruined 
the " form " of his works by dragging in 
digressions about erotics, humanitarianism, 
engineering or what you will, he will, your 
English friend, reply that he " wanted " to 
write it ; as who should say he wanted to get 
it off his chest. ^ That of course is a very 
relieving process for the novelist ; as for the 
individual may be the practice of expectoration 
in public places. To the community, as to 
literature, it is death. The novelist is not there 
to write what he " wants " but what he has, 
at the bidding of blind but august Destiny, to 
set down. Not what he wants but what he 
can, finally and consummately, put on paper 
is the final duty of the writer. It is the 
measure of Mr. James' stern performance of 
his duty that he has never written anything 
more upon the subject of the invisible world 
than the two or three stories that I have cited. 
And the nature of those stories, the obviously 
high pressure at which they were written, the 
obviously strong emotionalism that inspires 
them, proves to us sufficiently what a lot our 
poor master had all ready to get off his chest. 
But it all remains a part of this great writer's 

122 



^ 



TEMPERAMENTS 

private imaginings ; and the world is by so 
much the better — the better for the image of 
a great man who has greatly resisted a tempta- 
tion that is more deleterious than drink, 
echery, or any other of the cardinal sins. 

Mr. James, then, has limiited himself to 
writing of what he knows. And he has limited 
himself to writing about what he knows 
intimately and within himself. The ordinary 
writer — the Pre-Jamesian Anglo-Saxon, the 
Pre-Balzacian Continental, Balzac himself, I 
myself, and my friend Mr. Blank whose new 
work will be published on Monday by Messrs. 
Dash and Flutter — they, we, all of you, pretty 
nearly, do not so limit ourselves. If we are 
acquainted with the term " nine- cylinder, 160 
horse-power, non-rotary Breguet engine " and 
the fact — or perhaps it is not the fact — that a 
petrol engine running at high pressure develops 
the fumes of carbon monoxide or dioxide — 
given these facts we will, any one of us, under- 
take right away to provide you with the 
psychology of the driver of an aeroplane who 
becomes dizzy at ninety miles an hour and is 
dashed to pieces. We should also provide 
him with a lady friend to be dashed with him. 
That is the method of Shakespeare, Mr. 
Kipling, Mr. Wells, and whom you will, who 
either came before, or have not learned the 

123 



HENRY JAMES 

lessons of, the Deluge. I do not mean to say 
that there are not some of us who will not be 
more conscientious in acquiring the details of 
the buzz, bang, rush, whirr, pull the right lever, 
order. But, roughly speaking, our method is 
to infer — to the measure of the deductive 
genius vouchsafed us — from a few spanners 
the whole body of an aeroplane, the whole 
psychology of the pilot. We try, that is to say, 
to infer what would be the feelings of a " chap " 
going through the air at ninety miles an hour 
— to infer them from what would be our own 
feelings as we imagine them to be likely to be. 
That is how Shakespeare produced the King 
of Denmark for our delight ; so that Hamlet's 
stepfather is of no interest for us except as a 
sidelight on the inestimable character of poor 
dear Shakespeare and is entirely valueless as 
a document your servir, or as a guide to be- 
haviour in the presence of a sovereign. 

As regards the second of the golden spoons 
that Mr. James had in his mouth — I mean 
when he was born an American. . . . 

There can be no doubt that this in itself is 
very largely responsible for his knowledge — 
apart from his mere surmises — as to the human 
heart and as to human manners. The position 
of the American of some resources and of 

124 



TEMPERAMENTS 

leisure was, in European society of the nine- 
teenth centur}^ one of a singular felicity. 
Without, or almost without, letters of intro- 
duction or social passports of any kind, the 
American " went anywhere." Anywhere in 
the world — into the courts of the Emperors 
of Austria as into the bosom of English county 
families ! To know, or to admit an American 
into your family circle, appeared to commit 
you to nothing. There was the whole immense 
Herring Pond between yourself and their 
homes and you just accepted the strange and 
generally quiet creatures on their face values, 
without any question as to their origins, and 
taking their comfortable wealths for granted. 
Thus Mr. James could really get to " know " 
people in a way that would be absolutely sealed 
to any European young writer whether he 
were Honore de Balzac or Charles Dickens. 
You can figure him (I am not in any way 
attempting to do more than draw a fancy 
portrait) — a quiet, extremely well-mannered 
and unassuming young gentleman, reputed to 
be very wealthy and in command of an entire 
leisure, without indeed even so much tax on 
his time as an occasional professional call in at 
the Legation or ministry of his country. Still 
he would be — he was — taken on the footing of 
a young diplomat and, if he proved, on nearer 

125 



HENRY JAMES 

acquaintance, to be a thought more " in- 
tellectual " than one is accustomed to find in 
the young men that one meets in good houses, 
that was only part of a transatlantic oddness. 
Some oddnesses the amiable creatures must be 
allowed to possess, considering their distant 
and hazy origins ; you could be thankful if 
they did not sleep with derringers under their 
pillows — which they sometimes did — or pick 
their teeth with bowie knives. 

Thus we may consider that Mr. James, 
starting upon his European career, came in, 
at once, upon the very top. If he had been an 
English writer he would have been at it 
twenty years before he knew an English 
countess ; he would die without having ex- 
changed ten words with the wife of a duke, 
just as Balzac died without having had a 
glimpse of an interior of the Faubourg St. 
Germain. But that street of high walls had 
no terrors for Mr. James, and if his Madame 
de Bellegarde in some ways resembles a Balzac 
Marchioness, that is much more owing to the 
hold that Balzac and his methods had over our 
subject's imagination than to any want of 
social knowledge. Mr. James, I mean, knew 
perfectly well that the matrons of the most 
corrupt of European aristocracies do not go 
murdering their husbands in order to secure 

126 



TEMPERAMENTS 

eligible partis for their daughters. That is 
just a proceeding out of the fairy-tale realm 
of the Comedie Humaine. And indeed the 
whole machinery of the murder is amusingly 
handled. You can see the young James 
boggling at an actual poisoning so that the 
Marquis, from what one can make out of 
the episode, died at a look from his atrocious 
wife. Just imagine a vieux marcheur of a 
marquis, cynical, improper and given in 
addition to intrigues with housemaids, fading 
out of life presumably because he learns from 
a look that he has lost his wife's affections, 
for all the world as if he had been the New 
England heroine of a sentimental tale ! Mr. 
James, even at that early date, knew better 
as far as Life was concerned ; but his com- 
parative inexperience in the construction of 
novels led him into the paths of staginess. 
His desire was to give us the problem of what 
an aristocratic family would do when faced 
with a transatlantic gentleman with some sort 
of a " hold " over them. His invention went, 
however, at that date, no further than a 
" letter " — a veritable patte de mouche — at 
which the most craven of aristocrats would 
have roared with laughter. Nothing, indeed, 
could well be more comic than to observe how 
the Muse of our subject, who even at that date 

127 



HENRY JAMES 

was a delicate and contemplative young lady, 
minces around and refines upon this portentous 
subject which Mr. James tyrannously pre- 
sented to her, for all the world as if she had 
been presented with the task of ending the 
story of the proud Lady Dedlock and her 
disagreeable past. 

But the change came soon enough ; soon 
enough we find Mr, James beginning to listen 
to the voice of the lady who was so faithful to 
him through life. She made herself heard with 
her not loud, but distinct and persistent, organ 
long before even The American — not to mention 
The Portrait of a Lady — was under way. 

Mr. James' bibliography is a little difficult to 
follow, but, as far as I can make it out, Madame 
de Mauves, A Passionate Pilgrim and The 
Madonna of the Future were written imme- 
diately after Roderick Hudson and imme- 
diately before The American. In these three 
stories our master was beginning to find 
himself. 

If it is obvious it is none the less significant 
that, whereas our subject's novels remained 
until a latish date by comparison — but only by 
comparison — crude, his very earliest short 
stories have a quality of vague fragrance, of 
indeterminateness, of charm. I can imagine 
several reasons for this. 

128 



TEMPERAMENTS 

In the first place, there is the reason pru- 
dential. In the seventies of the last century 
anything in the nature of an exploring of one's 
temperament, and an exploiting of it, was no 
mean experiment. The dogma that it was 
necessary to have a story, " with a beginning, 
a middle, and an end" all complete, was hardly 
then doubted. It might be the story of a 
scrap of paper ; it might, as in the case of The 
Portrait of a Lady, turn round no more than 
the wicked husband and the femme incom-<^ 
prise, but " plot " there must be. Now to pin 
on to a mere experiment the immense labour, 
the long lapse of mere time, that go to the 
writing of a full-dress novel would be a very 
rash proceeding — and Mr. James was never the 
person to be rash. He would, in the nature of 
things, prefer to confine his desire for writing 
studies to his shorter flights. 

Secondly, we have to consider that, whatever 
he may or may not have otherwise been, Mr. 
James is — and was from the first — the great 
master of the nouvelle in the Anglo-Saxon 
tongue. This form (which is to the ordinary 
" plotted " short story what vers lihre is to 
the sonnet) can only be called in English 
the longish-short story — or the longish-short 
sketch. You do not find in it the economically 
worded, carefully progressing set of apparently 
I 129 



HENRY JAMES 

discursive episodes, all resolved, as it were, in 
the coup de cannon of the last sentence, that 
are found in one of the contes of Maupassant ; 
nor, on the other hand, is it a short novel like 
Paul and Virginia, The Vicar of Wakefield, or 
Colomba. It is rather no more and no less 
than the consideration of an " affair." The 
whole of the story, of the murder, of the liaison, 
of the bequest, might well be related in the 
opening of the first paragraph. 

The author might then devote the whole of 
the rest of the " action " to the consideration 
of the m^ental states of the various characters 
affected. I do not mean to say that he must 
do this ; still less is the Anglo-Saxon novelist 
to be allowed, as he is perpetually trying to do, 
to escape from the claims of " form " under the 
pretext that he is writing a nouvelle. The 
" form " of this type of production, like the 
form of vers libre, is infinitely the more difficult 
simply becavise it is the more undefined. That, 
however, is a matter to which I shall return. 
What I am mainly concerned with here is the 
fact that the nouvelle appears to offer unrivalled 
scope for the development of one's tempera- 
ment and that in it — in A Passionate Pilgrim 
as in The Madonna of the Future ; in Daisy Miller 
as in The Four Meetings — Mr. James foe many 
years had all the appearance of developing his. 

130 



TEMPERAMENTS 

This brings me at once to the consideration 
of Turgenieff, though I am aware that it never 
takes much to do that. I am still not con- 
cerned historically with exactly when our 
subject came across the beautiful genius ment- 
ally, or with the precise date on which he met 
him in the flesh. But the very first meeting 
with a nouvelle by the Russian writer must 
have been a wonderful eye-opener for our 
master. It must wonderfully, I mean, have 
shown him " what could be done " by, let us 
say, a contemplative and leisured young New 
Englander, wandering desultorily across Europe 
and privileged to hear the gossip of the best 
people. For admission into European — into 
any — society means no more and no less than 
the privilege to hear its gossip, to receive some 
of the confidences of matrons as to their worries 
about their daughters, to be privileged to hear 
some of the real, private views of the men folk 
as to certain others of their sex. This New 
Englander, thus wandering and thus privileged, 
and above ail loving (and being able to use) 
gossip as no one else ever loved or used it — this 
happy prince, Mr. James found himself to be. 
And, if the beautiful genius had not yet taken 
hold of him, there could not be any doubt that 
in the early seventies our distinguished friend 
was peculiarly in a state of grace — was pecu- 

131 



HENRY JAMES 

liarly open to the ravages of that particular 
bacillus. 

I think that in two quotations from one of 
our author's prefaces I can give you the whole 
of this one side of his figure. This is Mr. James 
writing in the summer of 1873, the story called 
Madame de Mauves : — 

I recall the tolerably wide court of an old inn at 
Bad-Homburg in the Taunus Hills — a dejected and 
forlorn little place (its seconde jeiinesse not yet in 
sight) during the years immediately following the 
Franco-Prussian war, which had overturned, with 
that of Baden Baden, its altar, the well-appointed 
worship of the great goddess Chance — a homely 
enclosure on the ground level of which I occupied a 
dampish, dusky, unsunned room, cool, however, to 
the relief of the fevered Muse, during some very hot 
weather. The place was so dark that I could see my 
way to and from my inkstand, I remember, but by 
keeping the door to the court open — thanks to which 
also the Muse, witness of many mild domestic inci- 
dents, was distracted and beguiled. In this retreat 
I was visited by the gentle Euphemia ; I sat in 
crepuscular comfort pouring forth again, and no 
doubt artfully editing, the confidences with which 
she honoured me. 

And isn't it just precisely after such a visit 
of his lady that Mr. James ma)^ have got up 
and strolled amidst the shaded paths around 

132 



TEMPERAMENTS 

the pump-room — the paths across which nowa- 
days the golf balls fly ? And, strolling decor- 
ously, must he not have met another decorous 
stroller, he listening with his sweet, sad, 
enigmatic smile to the confidences of Princess 

P who would be upon his right arm, and 

at the same time to those of landed-proprietor 

W ff who would be grumbling into his left 

ear ? Can't we imagine, in fact, that, strolling 
at such a pace, in much such a season, in that 
sort of place and frame of mind, in the con- 
templative and respectable seventies, our 
author first met the beautiful genius ? Let me 
once more hasten to say that this is only an 
imaginary picture of what might have hap- 
pened, Turgenieff having been much at Nau- 
heim, Homburg and similar places of sad or 
agreeable loungings. It would not be even 
necessary to postulate that our author ever 
met the Russian writer ; Turgenieff was in 
those days so much in the air, and the air then 
was so exactly suited to his frame of mind and 
so ready for his pervasion, that no actual 
meeting would have been in the least necessary. 
Mr. James would have had ''to go about 
with " the beautiful genius, if not in his actual 
company, in Paris, in Florence, on the Taunus 
Hills or in the haunts of ancient peace — he 
would have had to have Turgenieff with him, 

133 



HENRY JAMES 

if not at his side, then, in his head, in his heart, 
in his pockets, in his portmanteau. 

That then was the early James, in his 
chastened, rarefied, not yet quite European 
habit. Let us take a picture of him in his more 
hixuriant robustness, in his full strength, as 
nearly pagan as it was possible for one to be 
who was born under the shadow of Brook 
Farm or of Concord in its entirety. Mr. James 
is speaking here of how he got hold of the 
" subject " of The Reverberator that was 
published in 1888. 

" It was in a grand old city of the south of 
Europe (though neither in Rome nor yet in 
Florence) long years ago, and during a winter 
spent there in the seeing of many people on 
the pleasantest terms in the world, as they 
now seem to me to have been, as well as in the 
hearing of infinite talk — talk, mainly, inex- 
haustibly about persons and the personal 
equation and the personal mystery. This 
somehow had to be in an odd easy, friendly, a 
miscellaneous, many coloured little metro- 
polis, where the casual exotic society was a 
thing of heterogeneous vivid patches, but with 
a fine old native basis. ..." 

Between, however, the chastened, compara- 
tively reticent days and this luxuriance of 
phrase and of gossip as well — between these 

134 



TEMPERAMENTS 

two phases there went a whole mint of de- 
velopments. This we might well call the frame 
of mind of A Little Tour in France : this 
developed later into the frame of mind of The 
American Scene which again and later still 
was to become the mystifications and be- 
wilderments of The Prefaces, those wild 
debauches. 

But, in between the circumstances of 
Madame de Mauves of 1873, and the writing 
of The Little Tour, we have to place — as it 
helps us to place our subject — the collected 
papers of the volume called French Poets and 
Novelists, The volume was published in 
England in 1884, but the papers, as far as their 
writing was concerned, had been scattered 
through several previous years. In this 
volume our author desperately belauds Balzac, 
places Turgenieff at the top of the tree, damns 
Flaubert — whom he always disliked — poor dear 
old Flaubert ! — by bracketing him in the same 
paper with Charles de Bernard, an, even then, 
forgotten scribbler who hopelessly imitated 
but in some respects improved upon Balzac. 
He writes about Musset with great justice and 
very little sympathy ; about ce pauvre Theo 
with a great deal of sympathy and not much 
critical justice ; about George Sand with 
relish as a wicked old woman, and about 

135 



HENRY JAMES 

Merimee with pity for his physical ills and 
with not much feeling for his clear, hard 
diction. 

French Poets and Novelists is, in fact, much 
more — however skilfully Mr. James sought to 
veil the fact — an expression of likes and dis- 
likes than a display of criticism, criticism 
dealing with things by a certain standard and 
leaving liking to take care of itself. That does 
not make the volume any less valuable as an 
index to our present study — the development 
of Mr. James' temperament. As such it is 
just simply of the highest order. 

To write of L'Education Sentimentale — that 
illuminating work of which someone has said 
that even to begin to understand it you must 
read it fourteen times — and I, I who speak to 
you, have done that and affirm the truth of the 
other writer's statement — to write of this book 
thus : — 

" . . . To read it is, to the finer sense, like 
masticating ashes and sawdust. L'Education 
Sentimentale is elaborately and massively 
dreary. That a novel should have a certain 
charm seems to us the most rudimentary of 
principles, and there is no more charm in this 
laborious monument to a treacherous ideal 
than there is interest in a heap of gravel " — 
such writing is the merest petulance, the merest 

136 



TEMPERAMENTS 

vexation. The vexation was not without cause 
— for L'Education Sentimentale is, in its own 
self, that real Comedie Humaine that Balzac 
professed to have written ; and it is vexing 
to find that a real person has come along to do 
what one's pet charlatan has only professed to 
perform. 

Or again, such an obiter dictum as this, intro- 
duced into an article upon Charles Baudelaire 
whom our author much disliked : " Baude- 
laire was a poet, and for a poet to be a realist 
is nonsense " — to read such a sentence ! — 
makes one despair of human nature. But the 
fact is that our master was at that date a 
revolutionist of letters who, coming from New 
England in search of the Finer Sense and the 
Finer Reticence of Europe, much disliked what 
he found. Mr. James was in the same boat as 
Flaubert and Baudelaire, but his dislike for 
their figures in its expression was unbounded. 
Flaubert looked at life with all its dirt, its 
treacheries, its accepted ideas and, by rendering 
them to the life, might well have driven them 
out of existence. Mr. James also has looked 
at life with its treacheries, its banalities, its 
shirkings and its charlatanries, all of them 
founded on the essential dirtiness of human 
nature, — qui vous donne une fiere idee de 
Vhomme ! Like Flaubert, he has rendered 

137 



HENRY JAMES 

these tendencies of his fellows, but with a 
more delicate irony ; and, if the world read him 
to any great extent, the world might well be a 
pleasanter place. 

Yes, Mr. James was in the same boat with 
Flaubert, with Zola, with Turgenieff, with 
Maupassant, even with Baudelaire. But, since 
he had come to Europe to find respectability, 
he tried desperately to ally himself with 
the comparatively established Balzac, Sand, 
Charles de Bernard. One expects him almost, 
in these manifestoes, to enthrone Dumas Pere, 
and all his contemporaries — the aristocratic 
Turgenieff alone excepted (though even the 
beautiful genius whom he sets on a level with 
George Eliot ! was to be reproached, according 
to our author, with " delighting in sadness "). 
All his other contemporaries of any signi- 
ficance our author shrinks from. If it would 
be too much to say that this suggests to us the 
figure of Satan rebuking sin, at the very least 
it must suggest the elegantly habited form of 
a Robespierre animadverting on the dress, 
habits and aspirations of Danton, St. Just, 
Maillard and Couthon. 

/ The real fact is this : The volume called 
French Poets and Novelists is, before anything, 
the first expression of a gigantic disappoint- 
ment — the first formal confession of all the 

138 



TEMPERAMENTS 

young James' illusions perdus. It is impossible 
to imagine that Mr. James was ever even 
relatively naif ; yet, at the cost of scrupulously 
investigating, we find the impossible imagina- 
tion become the indubitable fact. There is a 
passage in A Passionate Pilgrim that puts 
the matter exactly enough — and all the more 
exactly because our subject, in his later 
revision, has very efficiently — and with a 
mature and bitter irony, crossed the "t's" and 
dotted every *' i." For, if this is what the 
fictitious Passionate Pilgrim came to find in 
Europe, isn't it what Mr. James, a pilgrim just 
as passionate and by now much more hopeless, 
so vainly sought ? 

It was my thought that I believed in pleasure here 
below ; I believe in it still, but as I believe in the 
immortality of the soul. The soul is immortal 
certainly — if you've got one ; but most people 
haven't. Pleasure would be right if it were pleasure 
right through ; but it never is. My taste was to be 
the best in the world : well, perhaps it was. ... I 
think I should have been all right in a world arranged 
on different lines. Before heaven, sir — whoever you 
are — I'm in practice so absurdly tender-hearted that 
I can afford to say it : I entered upon life a perfect 
gentleman. I had the love of old forms and pleasant 
rites, and I found them nowhere- — found a world all 
hard lines and harsh lights, without lines, without 
composition, as they say of pictures, without the 

139 



HENRY JAMES 

lovely mystery of colour. . . . Sitting here in this 
old park, in this old country, I feel that I hover on the 
misty verge of what might have been ! I should have 
been born here, not there ; here my makeshift 
distinctions would have found things they'd have been 
true of . . . This is a world I could have got on 
with beautifully. 

Thus the Passionate Pilgrim, sitting in no 
place further to seek than Hampton Court — 
this poor American, with all his naivete still 
virgin, voices what is the final, sad message of 
Henry James to humanity. Or perhaps the 
last words of The Madonna of the Future may 
enshrine the final message : "I seemed to 
catch the other . . . echo : ' Cats and monkeys, 
monkeys and cats — all human life is there.' " 
But that is perhaps too much of an echo of the 
Beautiful Genius to be true James ! No, I 
prefer " The soul is immortal certainly — if 
you've got one ; hut most people haven't I 
Pleasure would he right if it were pleasure right 
through ; hut it never is'' And this, you will 
observe, is the gentleman who reproached 
Turgenieff with delighting in sadness, Flaubert 
with cynicism, and Baudelaire with loving 
dirt! 

But that was in the early eighties when some 
of our subject's illusions still remained. 

I have said that the conscious or uncon- 

140 



TEMPERAMENTS 

scious mission of Mr. James was to civilise his 
people — whom he always loved. To put it 
more exactly, now that we have a little 
developed our theme, we should say that our 
author's mission in coming to the Old World 
was to find a milieu, an atmosphere, upon 
which America might safely model hers — an 
atmosphere irr~'w4^iehr~wiisc andr''^syTnpafthetic 
duchesses and countesses said always the right 
thing, observed the " old forms and pleasant 
rites," an atmosphere half that of Florence, 
half of Hampton Court with a flavour of 
Versailles. From Italy, France and England 
the dayspring was to have come ; but half a 
century of pilgrimages have left him with no 
further message than that — that the soul's 
immortal, but that most people have not got 
souls — are in the end just the stuff with which 
to fill graveyards ; that cela vous donne une 
fiere idee de Vhomme ; homo homini lupus, or 
any other old message of all the old messages 
of this old and wise world. Bric-a-brac, pal- 
lazzi, chateaux, haunts of ancient peace — these 
the pilgrim found in matchless abundance, 
in scores, in hundreds. Poynton, Matcham, 
Lackley, Hampton. ..." The gondola 
stopped ; the old palace was there. How 
charming ! it's grey and pink. . . ." From 
the first visit to Madonnas of the Louvre, in 

141 



HENRY JAMES 

The American, to the last days of the epony-^ 
•^^^mous vessel of The Golden Bowl, there is no 
end to the articles de veriu. , . . But as for the 
duchesses with souls — well, most duchesses 
haven't got them ! 

Italy gives you as her final figure the Prince 
of the last novel — a person not much different 
from any American ; England gives you, as 
the coping-stones of its haunts of humanity, 
Beale Farrange, the child bandied from pillar 
to post ; the Gereths, mother and son — 
brigand or imbecile ; and the Brigstocks. 
And France — well, as France would — France 
first knocked the stuffing out of our poor 
master's Utopia. . . . For, from New England 
the young James had looked upon Europe as 
a place where Balzac and George Eliot were 
worshipped in an atmosphere of old forms and 
pleasant rites. And in France he found 
Revolution — an atrocious figure of a sort of 
berserker in a dressing-gown who w^as banging 
down all the pillars of all the old academies 

and roaring out ''A has /" well, down with 

accepted ideas ! 

It was not, in fact, rest, amenities, serenities 
— other than in title — standards, rites, or 
anything settled, that Mr. James was to find 
in Europe. ... It was rather the shaking off 
of academicisms ; he left far more respect- 
>^ 142 



TEMPERAMENTS 

ability behind him, in New England. And 
the final knock came from an Empire of which 
New England might well never have heard — 
New England which cherished its reasoned 
optimism ; its belief in a Destiny that gives a 
chastenedly good time to the sober, the 
industrious, the continent — to those, in fact, 
that bridle, self-consciously, their passions. . . . 
That virus we may see already working in 
so early a book as The Portrait of a Lady. 
There, the self-conscious, self -bridling New 
England heroine ensues a lifetime of yearning 
misery at the hands of a possibly exaggerated, 
but still quite possible, pair of selfish scoun- 
drels, so that Providence fails of its mission. 
. . . No, the writer who, acting by the 
standards of New England, in 1884, reproves 
the Russian author for delighting in sadness, 
could very soon give Turgenieff several points 
and a good beating. For the Russian could 
never have written The Turn of the Screw ; 
and, if he could have given us Daisy Miller, he 
certainly could not have written : '' Cats and 
monkeys, monkeys and cats — all human life 
is there. ..." At the end of one of the 
Russian's books a character is left, sitting 
gazing enigmatically into space and wondering 
if Russia will ever produce a Man. But what 
Mr. James wants is a civilisation — and just 

143 



HENRY JAMES 

because the American's aspirations are bound- 
less by comparison, so his final note is despair. 
Turgeniefi's is only an enigmatic sadness. . . . 
That is the nett result. As to the stages of 
despair I have not the space — I have not 
indeed the inclination — to pursue them very 
minutely. . . . We have the decidedly con- 
tinental Mr. James who continued until the 
early eighties, ending perhaps with A Little 
Tour in France, in which perhaps he was taking 
a farewell conscious or unconscious of Latin 
ideas. We have the international frame of 
mind, as oiu^ author calls it — a phase which 
produced The Four Meetings, An International 
Episode, The Pension Beaurepas, The Siege of 
London, Lady Barharina — a phase which 
lasted, let us say, for four or five years with 
occasional revivals. We have what Mr. James 
calls the " Kensington days " which produced 
the wonderful studies of English authors and 
artists with their infinitely saddest of all lives 
led by mortal man. Those days of contact 
with the wonderful Yellow Book group gave 
us that wonderful series of stories — The Death 
of the Lion, The Lesson of the Master, The 
Next Time, The Real Thing, The Coxon Fund, 
Greville Fane — and just as the wonderful 
periodical was the only place in which these 
stories could have appeared, so our wonderful 

144 



TEMPERAMENTS 

master was the only man who could have given 
us those nouvelles, I harp so upon the word 
wonderful because I find literally nothing to 
say about these things — I have just wonder, 
and that is all that there is to it. . . . 

And then, in what it is convenient to label 
the Rye days, our master gave us firstly the 
final masterpiece — I don't mean the last, but 
the most consummate — in The Spoils of Poyn- 
ton. It was as if, with the failure and passing 
of The Yellow Book and of the Yellow group ; 
with the extinction of the last attempt at an 
establishment of a literary and artistic life in 
England — with the passing of the glorious early 
nineties, Mr. James gave up the attempt to 
make an artistic milieu interesting to the 
inhabitants of this island. The first and only 
attempt ! There is no doubt that it was 
another disillusionment. . . . 

Our subject had tried to find in London, in 
English society, a region, or at least a corner, in 
which the only really productive class (of all 
the classes and all the masses) might be, if not 
honoured, then at least allowed some social 
value, even if it were the barest of social 
existences. But, with The Death of the Lion 
he had seen to the bottom of that possibility. 
A master, as he seems to tell us, might have 
a chance of an invitation to an " English 
K 145 



HENRY JAMES 

country house," but only on condition that he 
was a Lion. And then he would have to 
compete with Guy Walsingham, the lady 
novelist with a male pseudonym, and with a 
moustached wonder writing under a lady's 
name ; and he would, the master, be allowed 
no fire in his bedroom and would die of pneu- 
monia in such a way as to get the hostess great 
credit in the Press for having afforded the 
master a room in which to die. . . . 

So that, giving up this attempt to paint a 
life which is no life — (since in England the 
author, as such, ranks beneath the governess 
and the vicar and just above the servants, has 
no canons, no costume, no habits as a class 
and no rank in the State, and it is impossible 
to make " atmospheric " studies of a life where 
there are no habits, no costumes, no manners, 
no canons, no standard, no solidarity, no aims, 
and no rank in the State !) — giving up this 
impossible attempt Mr. James devoted himself 
to the task of portraying the lives of English 
people who were just people — good people, 
comfortably off, as a rule. He had tried to 
find his Great Good Place — his earthly Utopia 
— in Italy, in France, in English literary life. 
He had failed. 

He found English people who were just 
people singularly nasty. For he gave us The 

146 



TEMPERAMENTS 

Spoils of Poynton, a romance of English grab ; 
What Maisie Knew, a romance of the English 
habit of trying to shift responsibility; The 
Turn of the Screw, a romance of the English 
habit of leaving young children to the care of 
improper maids and salacious ostlers ; and so 
on, right up to The Golden Bowl and The Bench 
of Desolation, neither of which could be called 
exactly " pretty " stories, though the latter 
is cheerful by comparison and in a desolating 
way. 

So that it was not there, I imagine, that he 
found his Place. It was — again I imagine — in 
desperation that, quite late, he essayed a 
pijgnnaa^e amongst his own people. This was 
probably foreshadowed iii iChe Golden Bowl, 
which was another international storv, re- 
introducing American characters. It is diffi- 
cult to say how much Mr. James enjoyed the 
American Scene ; the splendid product is there 
for examination ; but I will hazard a small 
fortune in a bet that our author, if he did not 
find the average American any whit less 
desirable or less civilised than the average 
European, brought away nothing that could 
shake his conviction that most people have not 
got souls. . . . 

Therefore we have the image of the Great 
Good Place — that only real castle in the air, 

147 



HENRY JAMES 

that ever-unattained and ever-waiting region, 
beyond the frontiers of every horizon, the place 
that, when our eyes are weary and when we 
shut them, we may imagine. Of that place 
indeed — but it is not in Europe — Mr. James 
may say with his Pilgrim : — 

" Sitting here, in this old park, in this old 
country, I feel that I hover on the misty verge 
of what might have been. I should have been 
born here, not there ; here my makeshift 
distinctions would have found things they'd 
have been true of . . ." 

But that old park, in that old country, exists, 
alas and alas, only in Mr. James' mind. . . . 



148 



IV 

METHODS 

The writing of this little book has proved 
almost the most thankless — as it is certainly 
the most formidable — task that I ever under- 
took. Under protest, as it were, I have written 
some weary chapters upon our subject's sub- 
jects. That, I believe, is demanded in a mono- 
graph upon a writer's works and, it would be, 
I am credibly informed, obtaining attention 
under false pretences to omit some such 
speculation. I have written, not so un- 
willingly, some further chapters — still against 
the collar — upon Mr. James' temperament, 
which is the same thing as his " message." 
I had hoped to do some of the sort of work 
that I really like doing when I came to the 
chapter upon this master's methods — upon his 
" technique." 

I can't myself, for the life of me, see that a 
writer's subjects concern any soul but himself. 
They have nothing more to do with criticism 

149 



HENRY JAMES 

than eggs with aeroplanes. A critic may hke 
a class of subject or may dislike them — for 
myself I like books about fox-hunting better 
than any other book to have a good read in. 
I would rather read Tilbury Nogo than Daniel 
Deronda, and any book of Surtees than any 
book of George Meredith — excepting perhaps 
Evan Harrington, which is a jolly thing with a 
good description of country house cricket. 
But that is merely a statement of preferences, 
like any other English writing about books. 
This latter leads the reader, as a rule, no further 
than to tell him that Messrs. Lang, Collins, or 
who you will, like reading about golf, Charlotte 
Corday, the Murder in the Red Barn and, what 
you will — facts which may be interesting in 
themselves but which have nothing to do with 
how a book should be, or is not, written. 

Similarly with disquisitions upon the tem- 
perament of a writer — since temperament is a 
thing like sunshine or the growing of grass, a 
gift of the good God. One may write about it 
if one likes, if one has nothing better to do ; 
it is a sort of gossip like any other sort of 
gossip and, if it does no good in particular, it 
breaks no bones. Twenty of us, confined in a 
country house by a south-westerly gale, may 
well set to work to discuss the temperaments 
of our friends. " I like so and so," one of us 

150 



METHODS 

will say, "he is so considerate " ; "I prefer 
Mrs. Dash," another replies, " she is so force- 
ful." But all the talk will not make the friend 
of So-and-so, with a taste for the milder 
virtues, like Mrs. Dash whose attractions are of 
a more vigorous type. That is as much as to 
say that any penny-a-liner might call your atten- 
tion to the temperament of Mr. AV. H. Hudson, 
which is the most beautiful thing that God ever 
made, though twenty thousand first- class critics 
thundering together could not make Mr. James 
like Flaubert. Still, disquisitions upon tem- 
perament may do this amount of good : 
Supposing that the only work of Mr. James 
that you had happened to glance at had been 
The Great Good Place, and supposing that you 
had no taste for mysticism, preferring the 
eerily horrible or the suavely social ! You 
would have put Mr. James' volume down and 
would have sworn never to take another up. 
Then — coming in some newspaper quotation 
upon some passage about The Turn of the 
Screw, which is the most eerie and harrowing 
story that was ever written — you might dis- 
cover that here was a temperament, after all, 
infinitely to your taste. So that some profit 
might come from that form of wilting. 

But criticism concerns itself with methods 
and with methods and again with methods — 

151 



HiENRY JAMES 

and with nothing else. So that, having waded 
wearily through a considerable amount of 
writing that I can only compare to duty-calls, 
I was rejoicing at the thought of letting myself 
go. I felt as a horse does when, after a tiring 
day between the shafts, it is let loose into a 
goodly grass field. There seemed to be such 
reams that one might, all joyfully, write about 
the methods of this supremely great master of 
method. I had promised myself the real treat 
of my life. ... 

But alas, there is nothing to write ! I do 
not mean to say that nothing could have been 
written — but it has all been done. Mr. James 
has done it himself. In the matchless — and 
certainly bewildering series of Prefaces to the 
collected edition, there is no single story that 
has not been annotated, critically written 
about and (again critically) sucked as dry as 
any orange. There is nothing left for the poor 
critic but the merest of quotations. 

I desired to say that the supreme discovery 
in the literary art of our day is that of Impres- 
sionism, that the supreme function of Impres- 
sionism is selection, and that Mr. James has 
carried the power of selection so far that he 
can create an impression with nothing at all. 
And, indeed, that had been what for many 
years I have been desiring to say about our 

152 



METHODS 

master ! He can convey an impression, an 
atmosphere of what you will with literally 
nothing. Embarrassment, chastened happi- 
ness — for his happiness is always tinged with 
regret — greed, horror, social vacuity — he can 
give you it all with a purely blank page. His 
characters will talk about rain, about the 
opera, about the moral aspects of the selling 
of Old Masters to the New Republic, and those 
conversations will convey to your mind that 
the quiet talkers are living in an atmosphere 
of horror, of bankruptcy, of passion hopeless 
as the Dies Irae ! That is the supreme trick of 
art to-day, since that is how we really talk 
about the musical glasses whilst our lives 
crumble to pieces around us. Shakespeare did 
that once or twice — as when Desdemona 
gossips about her mother's maid called Bar- 
bara whilst she is under the very shadow of 
death ; but there is hardly any other novelist 
that has done it. Our subject does it, however, 
all the time, and that is one reason for the 
impression that his books give us of vibrating 
reality. I think the word " vibrating " exactly 
expresses it ; the sensation is due to the fact 
that the mind passes, as it does in real life, 
perpetually backwards and forwards between 
the apparent aspect of things and the essen- 
tials of life. If you have ever, I mean, been 

153 



HENRY JAMES 

ruined, it will have been a succession of pictures 
like the following. Things have been going to 
the devil with you for some time ; you have 
been worried and worn and badgered and 
beaten. The thing will be at its climax to- 
morrow. You cannot stand the strain in town 
and you ask your best friend — who won't be a 
friend any more to-morrow, human nature 
being what it is ! — to take a day off at golf 
with you. In the afternoon, whilst the Courts 
or the Stock Exchange or some woman up in 
town are sending you to the devil, you play 
a foursome, with two other friends. The sky 
is blue ; you joke about the hardness of the 
greens ; your partner makes an extraordinary 
stroke at the ninth hole ; you put in some 
gossip about a woman in a green jersey who 
is playing at the fourteenth. From what one 
of the other men replies you become aware 
that all those three men know that to-morrow 
there will be an end of you ; the sense of that 
immense catastrophe broods all over the green 
and sunlit landscape. You take your mashie 
and make the approach shot of your life whilst 
you are joking about the other fellow's neck- 
tie, and he says that if you play like that on 
the second of next month you will certainly 
take the club medal, though he knows, and 
you know, and they all know you know, 

154 



METHODS 

that by the second of next month not a soul 
there will talk to you or play with you. So you 
finish the match three up and you walk into 
the club house and pick up an illustrated 
paper. . . . 

That, you know, is what life really is — a series 
of such meaningless episodes beneath the 
shadow of doom — or of impending bliss, if you 
prefer it. And that is what Henry James 
gives you — an immense body of work all 
dominated with that vibration — with that 
balancing of the mind between the great out- 
lines and the petty details. And, at times, as 
I have said, he does this so consummately that 
all mention of the major motive is left out 
altogether. But it is superfluous for me to say 
this because it is already said — in a Preface. 
Consider this : — 

Only make the reader's general vision of evil 
intense enough, I said to myself — 

Mr. James is considering how to make The 
Turn of the Screw sufficiently horrible — 

— and that already is a charming job — and his 
own experience, his own imagination, his own 
sympathy (with the children) and horror (of their 
false friends) will supply him quite sufficiently with 
all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make 
him think it for himself, and you are released from 

155 



HENRY JAMES 

weak specifications. This ingenuity I took pains — 
as indeed great pains were required^ — to apply ; and 
with a success apparently beyond my liveliest hope. 
. . . How can I feel my calculation to have failed 
... on my being assailed, as has befallen me, with 
the charge of a monstrous emphasis, the charge of 
indecently expatiating [upon the corruption of soul 
of two haunted children] ? There is . . . not an 
inch of expatiation . . . my values are positively all 
blanks save so far as an excited horror . . . pro- 
ceeds to read into them more or less fantastic 
figures. ... 

Here again is one passage v^hich exactly 
gives you the measure of how the horror is 
suggested. You are dealing with a little boy 
who has been expelled from school on a vague 
charge. This little boy and his sister have 
been corrupted — in ways that are never shown 
— by a governess and a groom in whose society 
they had been once left and who now, being 
dead, haunt, as revenanis, the doomed children. 
The new governess is asking him why he was 
expelled from school, and the little boy answers 
that he did not open letters, did not steal. 

" What then did you do ? " 

He looked in vague pain all round the top of the 
room and drew his breath two or three times as if 
with difficulty. He might have been standing at the 
bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some green 
twilight. '' Well— I said things." 

156 



METHODS 

" Only that ? " 

" They thought it enough ! " . . . 

" But to whom did you say them ? . . . Was it to 
every one ? " I asked. 

" No, it was only to " But he gave a sick little 

headshake. '' I don't remember their names." 

" Were they then so many ? " 

" No— only a few. Those I liked." 

*' . . . And did they repeat what you said," I went 
on after a pause. . . . 

'' Oh, yes," he nevertheless replied — " they must 
have repeated them. To those they liked." 

" And those things came round ? " 

*' To the masters ? Oh yes ! " he answered very 
simply. 

I have stripped this episode of all its descrip- 
tive passages save one in order to reduce it to 
the barest and most crude of bones, in order to 
show just exactly what the hard skeleton is. 
And it will be observed that the whole matter 
— the whole skeleton or the only bone of it 
— is the one word " things " — "I said 
things." 

But, as I have said, Mr. James, unfortunately 
for me, has uttered already practically all that 
there is to be said about his own methods. 
Let us therefore — under the heading of 
" form " — follow, by means of quotations, his 
methods in the construction of some of his 
stories. 

157 



HENRY JAMES 

Here we have our author, at a dinner, 
gathering the scheme for a single-figure 
storyi : — 

For by what else in the world but by fatal design 
had I been placed at dinner one autumn evening of 
old London days face to face with a gentleman, met 
for the first time, though favourably known to me by 
name and fame, in whom I recognised the most 
unbridled colloquial romancer the " joy of life " had 
ever found occasion to envy ? Under what other 
conceivable coercion had I been invited to reckon, 
through the evening, with the type, with the char- 
acter, with the countenance of this magnificent 
master's wife, who, veracious, serene, and charming, 
yet not once meeting straight the eyes of one of us, 
did her duty by each, and by her husband most of 
all, without so much as, in the vulgar phrase, turning 
a hair ? It was long ago, but I have never, to this 
hour, forgotten the evening itself — embalmed for me 
now in an old-time sweetness beyond any aspect of 
my reproduction. I made but a fifth person, the 
other couple our host and hostess ; between whom 
and one of the company, while we listened to the 
woven wonders of a summer holiday, the exploits of 
a salamander, among Mediterranean isles, were 
exchanged, dimly and discreetly, ever so guardedly, 
but all expressively, imperceptible lingering looks. 
It was exquisite, it could but become, inevitably, 
some " short story " or other, which it clearly pre- 
fitted as the hand the glove. 

1 Collected Edition. Preface to Vol. XII. 

158 



METHODS 

Here again is Mr. James catching hold, at 
first hand, of the germ — once more at a dinner- 
table — once more with the mind quickly at 
work — of The Spoils of Poynton ^ : — 

So it was, at any rate, that when my amiable 
friend, on the Christmas Eve, before the table that 
glowed safe and fair through the brown London night, 
spoke of such an odd matter as that a good lady in 
the north, always well looked on, was at daggers 
drawn with her only son, ever hitherto exemplary, 
over the ownership of the valuable furniture of a 
fine old house just accruing to the young man by his 
father's death, I instantly became aware, with my 
" sense for the subject," of the prick of inoculation ; 
the whole of the virus, as I have called it, being infused 
by that single touch. There had been but ten words, 
yet I had recognised in them, as in a flash, all the 
possibihties of the httle drama of my Spoils, 
which glimmered then and there into life ; so that 
when in the next breath I began to hear of action 
taken, on the beautiful ground, by our engaged 
adversaries, tipped each, from that instant, with the 
light of the highest distinction, I saw clumsy Life 
again at her stupid work. For the action taken, and 
on which my friend, as I knew she would, had already 
begun all complacently and benightedly further to 
report, I had absolutely, and could have, no scrap of 
use. ... 

Or here you have Mr. James catching hold 
of an idea and, in the very motion of catching 

^ Collected Edition. Vol. X^ Preface^ p. 1. 

159 



HENRY JAMES 

that golden ball, rendering it more complex 
and more symmetrical^ : — 

I recognise again, for the first of these three Tales, 
another instance of the growth of the "' great oak " 
from the little acorn ; since What Maisie Knew is 
at least a tree that spreads beyond any provision its 
small germ might on a first handling have appeared 
likely to make for it. The accidental mention had 
been made to me of the manner in which the situation 
of some luckless child of a divorced couple was 
affected, under my informant's eyes, by the re- 
marriage of one of its parents — I forget which ; so 
that, thanks to the limited desire for its company 
expressed by the step-parent, the law of its little life, 
its being entertained in rotation by its father and its 
mother, wouldn't easily prevail. Whereas all of these 
persons had at first vindictively desired to keep it 
from the other, so at present the re-married relative 
sought now rather to be rid of it — that is to leave it 
as much as possible, and beyond the appointed times 
and seasons, on the hands of the adversary ; which 
malpractice, resented by the latter as bad faith, 
would of course be repaid and avenged by an equal 
treachery. The wretched infant was thus to find 
itself practically disowned, rebounding from racquet 
to racquet like a tennis ball or a shuttlecock. This 
figure could but touch the fancy to the quick and 
strike one as the beginning of a story — a story com- 
manding a great choice of developments. I recollect, 
however, promptly thinking that for a proper sym- 

1 Collected Edition. Vol. XI, Preface. 

160 



METHODS 

metry the second parent should marry too — which 
in the case named to me indeed would probably soon 
occur, and was in any case what the ideal of the 
situation required. 

And with that we enter at once upon the 
vexed and controversial ground of the " hand- 
ling " that an author may permit himself of 
his subject, once he has picked it up. The 
French school of the seventies and eighties — 
Maupassant, Flaubert, the Goncourts and the 
rest, up to M. France himself — held that a 
subject from the life was the merest suggestion. 
Once the suggestion was taken hold of, it 
should be turned over and over in the mind 
until the last drop of suggestion that could 
come from the original idea was squeezed out 
of it. So that, in such a masterpiece of this 
type as Madame Bovary, or for the matter of 
that, Germinie Lacerteux, every incident, every 
word, every apparent digression, made tow^ards 
the inevitable end. In that way a feeling of 
destiny was produced, a grim semblance of an 
implacable outside Providence. Of course the 
real fineness of the art lay in concealing the 
art — in making the digressions appear like 
real negligences, as they appear in the life we 
lead. Outside this school there has been arising 
another^ which, for convenience, we may call 
the neo-Russian school ; though, as regards 
L 161 



HENRY JAMES 

the construction of their stories, these might 
almost as well be called neo-Primitives. 

The Russians, in fact, like any other peasant 
people, have an inborn gift of telling stories ; 
they have no need to be hurried, since for 
thousands and untold thousands of years they 
have been peasants without any hope of 
becoming anything else. They tell, round their 
stoves, stories of an incredible length for which, 
since they are also a very patient people, they 
find ready and attentive listeners. They leave 
nothing out, they sacrifice nothing in the 
desire to come more quickly to an end. They 
go on and on — talking, talking. Their gift is, 
in fact, the exact inverse of that of the Ameri- 
can " anecdotist " or of the Japanese poets 
who will get an epic into four lines : — 

" I went to fetch water from the spring : 
I found that a convolvulus had twined its tendrils round 

the well-rope. 
I went and borrowed water from my neighbour. ..." 

A Russian peasant would take two days in 
telling that story, giving you the genealogy 
and the history of the province, the fact that 
it was necessary to bribe the Governor with 
rouble notes hidden in bread-offerings, and 
hour-long dissertations on the goodness of God 
and the nature of the feelings that it is probable 

162 



METHODS 

a clinging tendril might have. And this is not 
merely a matter of selection. It is the self- 
protective spirit of the race which does not and 
cannot feel itself safe unless every loophole for 
objection is closed up. It needs documented 
reality and documented reality and again 
documented reality. 

In that way you have such writers as the 
late Count Tolstoy and the late Fyodor 
Dostoieffsky, story-tellers of the most intense 
literal realism, with an unrivalled gift for 
rendering the scenes that they choose for 
rendering. They choose those scenes, however, 
without much consideration of whether they 
have any effect in carrying the story forward, 
or are of any other use than that of expressing 
passionate convictions of the author. Between 
the French schools and the Russian there stands 
the figure of Turgenieff who had instinctively 
a great deal of the Frenchman's art — his very 
first short story is as finished in form as the 
most perfect of Maupassant's conies — ^and who 
had a self-effacement unknown otherwise 
amongst the Russians who are mostly peda- 
gogues. And the most valuable of all the 
innumerable matters in Mr. James' Prefaces 
concerns itself with the beautiful genius as a 
builder up of stories^ : — 

J Collected Edition. Preface, Vol. III. 

163 



HENRY JAMES 

I have always fondly remembered a remark that 
I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgenieff 
m regard to his own experience of the usual origin of 
the fictive picture. It began for him almost always 
with the vision of some person or persons, who 
hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or 
passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him 
just as they were and by what they w^ere. He saw 
them, in that fashion, as disyonihles^ saw them sub- 
ject to the chances, the complications of existence, 
and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them 
the right relations, those that would most bring them 
out ; to imagine, to invent and select and piece 
together the situations most useful and favourable to 
the sense of the creatures themselves, the complica- 
tions they would be most likely to produce and to feel. 

" To arrive at these things is to arrive at my 
' story,' " he said, " and that's the way I look for it. 
The result is that I'm often accused of not having 
' story ' enough. I seem to myself to have as much 
as I need — to show my people, to exhibit their 
relations with each other ; for that is all my measure. 
If I watch them long enough I see them come together, 
I see them placed, I see them engaged in this or that 
act and in this or that difficulty. How they look and 
move and speak and behave, always in the setting I 
have found for them, is my account of them — of which 
I dare say, alas, que cela manque souvent d' architecture. 
But I would rather, I think, have too little archi- 
tecture than too much — when there's danger of its 
interfering with my measure of the truth. The 
French of course like more of it than I give — having 

164 



METHODS 

by their own genius such a hand for it ; and indeed 
one must give all one can. As for the origin of one's 
wind-blown germs themselves, who shall say, as you 
ask, where they come from ? We have to go too far 
back, too far behind, to say. Isn't it all we can say 
that they come from every quarter of heaven, that 
they are there at almost any turn of the road ? 
They accumulate, and we are always picking them 
over, selecting among them. They are the breath of 
life — by which I mean that life, in its own way, 
breathes them upon us. They are so, in a manner 
prescribed and imposed — floated into our minds by 
the current of life. That reduces to imbecility the 
vain critic's quarrel, so often, with one's subject, 
when he hasn't the wit to accept it. Will he point out 
then which other it should properly have been ? — 
his office being, essentially, to point out. II en serait 
Men embarrasse. Ah, when he points out what I've 
done or failed to do with it, that's another matter : 
there he's on his ground. I give him up my ' archi- 
tecture,' " my distinguished friend concluded, " as 
much as he will." 

Mr. James, if he professes himself infinitely 
grateful to Turgenieff for the service of these 
hints, nevertheless inclines actually rather to 
the French method of building up a subject. 
In a note upon Daisy Miller^ his earliest " story," 
he characteristically justifies his proceedings 
which characterise his later years even more 
than his former ^ : — 

1 Collected Edition. Vol. XVIII, Preface. 

165 



HENRY JAMES 

It was in Italy again — in Venice and in the prized 
society of an interesting friend, now dead, with whom 
I happened to wait, on the Grand Canal, at the 
animated water-steps of one of the hotels. The 
considerable little terrace there was so disposed as 
to make a salient stage for certain demonstrations on 
the part of two young girls, children they, if ever, of 
Nature and of freedom, whose use of those resources, 
in the general public eye, and under our own as we 
sat in the gondola, drew from the lips of a second 
companion, sociably afloat with us, the remark that 
there before us, with no sign absent, were a couple of 
attesting Daisy Millers. Then it was that, in my 
charming hostess's prompt protest, the whirligig, as 
I have called it, at once betrayed itself. '' How can 
you liken those creatures to a figure of which the only 
fault is touchingly to have transmuted so sorry a type 
and to have, by a poetic artifice, not only led our 
judgment of it astray, but made any judgment quite 
impossible ? " With which this gentle lady and 
admirable critic turned on the author himself. " You 
know you quite falsified, by the turn you gave it, 
the thing you had begun with having in mind, the 
thing you had had, to satiety, the chance of ' ob- 
serving ' : your pretty perversion of it, or your un- 
principled mystification of our sense of it, does it 
really too much honour — in spite of which, none the 
less, as anything charming or touching always to 
that extent justifies itself, we after a fashion forgive 
and understand you. But why waste your romance ? 
There are cases, too many, in which you've done it 
again ; in which, provoked by a spirit of observation 

166 



METHODS 

at first no doubt sufficiently sincere, and with the 
measured and felt truth fairly twitching your sleeve, 
you have yielded to your incurable prejudice in 
favour of grace — to whatever it is in you that makes 
so inordinately for form and prettiness and pathos ; 
not to say sometimes for misplaced drolling. Is it 
that you've after all too much imagination ? Those 
awful yovmg women capering at the hotel door, they are 
the real little Daisy Millers that were ; whereas yours 
in the tale is such a one, more's the pity, as — for pitch 
of the ingenuous, for quality of the artless — couldn't 
possibly have been at all," My answer to all which 
bristled of course with more professions than I can 
or need report here ; the chief of them inevitably to 
the effect that my supposedly typical little figure was 
of course pure poetry, and had never been anything 
else ; since this is what helpful imagination, in how- 
ever slight a dose, ever directly makes for. 

Thus according to our subject's conscious 
canons an author is justified in sacrificing, if 
not the inherent probabilities of his " affair," 
then at least the photographic realities, to his 
sense of beauty. Beauty he elsewhere defines 
as the fun, the interest, the amusingness, the 
awakening qualities of a story. . . . 

Action, that is to say, in the sense of any- 
body's doing anything, is singularly rare in any 
of Mr. James' nouvelles ; but what the French 
call progression d'ejfet is never absent from 
the almost apparently negligible of them. 

167 



HENRY JAMES 

The aspect of the " affair " in hand will change 
incredibly whilst the characters do no more 
than sit in arm-chairs or open bookcases. In 
that sense " nouvelles " by this author, how- 
ever much they may resemble " studies," are 
never anything of the sort. The treatment of 
mental progressions is so rare in Anglo-Saxon 
— and for the matter of that in Latin — fiction 
that the unsuspecting reader might well mis- 
take the mood of The Lesson of the Master for 
the mood of Bielshin Prairie, which is a true 
sketch. Mr. James, however, has never, as 
far as I can recall, given us a real sketch, any 
more than Daisy Miller, which he labels " a 
study " is a real study. The Point of View 
might pass for one of these, but as a matter of 
fact it is a true short story, the account of 
conflicting irresolutions ending in a deter- 
mination. To a school of readers whose chief 
pabula are spotless detectives conflicting with 
besmirched criminals, traffickers in white slaves 
with unspotted victims, or idle rich with spot- 
less poor and the black generally with the 
white ; whose " action " is limited to the de- 
ciphering of cryptograms, the unveiling of ad- 
venturesses, the dismantling of the stage with 
revolver shots and so on — to the readers of 
such enlivening fictions the actions and pro- 
gressions of our author — those conflicts of irreso- 

168 



METHODS 

lution with irresolution whose only pistol shot 
is the arriving at a determination — may well 
bear the aspects of studies in metaphysics. 
But, actually upon its larger scale and with 
its reversing of the order of the incidents, every 
short story of Mr. James' is a true short story 
— as dependent for surprise upon its last word 
as is La Parure. If you will take The Turn of 
the Screw, with its apparent digressions, its 
speculations, its turns and its twists, you wdll 
see that the real interest centres round the 
proposition : Is the narrator right or wrong 
in thinking that if the little boy can only 
disburden himself of a full confession he will 
be saved for ever from the evil ascendancy of 
Peter Quint. And this hangs in the balance 
until the very last sentence settles it : 

" We were alone with the quiet day, and his 
little heart, dispossessed, had stopped." 

Maupassant would have told the story in ten 
pages, Mr. James taking one hundred and 
fifty. But, though the French genius would 
have removed from it the aspect of being a 
nouvelle, he could have made it no more of a 
conte, except for the shortness. Mr. James' 
sense of form is, in fact, so nice as to be un- 
rivalled ; his sense of his subject is nearly as 
fierce as Flaubert's ; his digressions are no 
more digressions ; his disquisitions no more 

169 



HENRY JAMES 

disquisitions. If he seldom goes so far as to 
give us a final sentence like : " Personne ne 
croyait que VAhhe s'etait donne la mort,^^ 
he does it — as if to show us that he can — 
superbly in the sentence I have just quoted. 
Generally it strikes him as a device too barbaric 
and one to be shrunk from. 
/^ Mr. James, in fact, shrinks from most 
(definite things. Heaven knows there is no 
reason why he should not shrink from them 
just as his and our nations — just as all Anglo- 
Saxondom shrinks from the definite statement. 
His glass — ^the poor dear English language and 
the poor dear Puritan temperament — isn't very 
big, but it is capable of infinite arabesques^ 
The Latin and the Papist spirit isn't in the 
least afraid of definition or of coarseness if the 
defining of a situation calls for coarseness, 
cynicism or brutality. " Tu es Petrus, et 
super . . ."we are accustomed to say, taking 
the words on their face value. . . . But the 
American and the Englishman, the essential 
Protestants, shrink from a direct proposition 
whether it be made by Our Lord or by any 
other person. And, if they shrink from the 
hearing of a direct proposition, refining and 
■^> refining away the incidence, until it appears no 
more than allegory in the end, still more will 
they shrink from putting a direct statement 

170 



METHODS 

into direct words. As I have pointed out else- 
where, when a French peasant sees a suspicious 
character upon the road, he says : " C'est 
qu^qiie maoufatan''^ — "It's some evildoer," 
the English farm labourer would say : "I 
guess he's up to no good." And, just as the 
Anglo-Saxon shrinks from a direct statement 
of fact — insisting that it shall be said to him 
instead of " The majority of the House of 
Commons closured the Budget through " — 
" Le Roy remercy ses hons sujets et ainsi le 
veulW'' which is a silly sort of lie — or just as he 
prefers the allegorical statement : " We handed 
him a lemon and he quit," to a harsh account 
of business proceedings, so invariably, wishing 
all statements made to him — if they are to 
carry conviction — to be wi'apped up in allegory, 
he is the best Anglo-Saxon who most wraps up 
his statements. 

(r Mr. James expresses matchlessly his race 
and its religion. These call for delicate and 
sympathetic deeds and gentle surmises rather 
than for clear actions and definite beliefs. So 
Mr. James first refines all action out of his work 
— all non-psychological action — and, little by 
little, sets himself to express himself purely in 
allegory. 

What he has got from abroad is the technique 
foi Form, and in that he has reunited the 

171 



HENRY JAMES 

stream of Anglo-Saxon imagination with the 
broad stream of international culture. He 
has in short written, in English, books that are 
worthy to be read by readers of the great 
Continental writers. As far as his phraseology 
goes (and le style c'est Vhomme) he has expressed 
his race. And for a man to have attained to 
international rank with phrases intimately 
national, is the supreme achievement of writers 
— a glory that is reserved only for the Dantes, 
the Goethes and the Shakespeares, who none 
the less remain supremely national. 

I am not saying that the tendency to write 
allegorically may not be carried too far. To 
say that " X had not succeeded in planting in 
his temperate garden a specimen of the rank 
exotic each of whose leaves is a rustling 
cheque," may have its disadvantages as well 
as its advantages considered as a way of ex- 
pressing the fact that X wrote books that did 
not pay. It is not at any rate journalese, thatc 
flail of the Anglo-Saxon race, that infinite 
corrupter of the Anglo-Saxon mind, that des- 
tined and ultimate cause of the downfall of 
Anglo-Saxon empires, since the race that can- 
not either in allegories or in direct speech think 
clearly is doomed to fall before nations who 
can; and Japan is ever on the threshold with 
the tendrils twining round its well-ropes. . . . 

172 



y 



METHODS 

But the question of the taste for allegorical 
modes of expression is after all only a question 
of taste. Personally I should say that Mr. 
James' " style " strikes me as almost un- 
approachable up to the day when he concluded 
yThe Spoils of Poynton ; it is lucid, picturesque 
and as forcible as it can be, considering that he 
writes in English. With What Maisie Knew 
it begins to become, as we should say in talking 
of pheasants, a little " high." And so it goes 
on until, with the Prefaces and with A Small 
Boy, it just simply soars. There is not any 
other word for it. . . . 

But that is only a question again of taste, 
and it is very possible that generations trained 
in the appreciation of this author will find 
^>-vapid what to me seems clear, and that such a 
sentence as — the succession of fifty thousand 
sentences such as : " There at any rate — for 
the story, that is, for the pearl of my idea — I 
had to take, in the name of the particular 
instance, no less deep and straight a dive into 
the deep sea of a certain general truth than I 
had taken in quest of Flickerbridge." 

It obviously means something — they all 
obviously mean something, the five hundred 
thousand sentences of the Prefaces, of A 
Small Boy, of The American Scene, If you will 
read them aloud you will find them reasonably 

173 



HENRY JAMES 

clear. For the latest James — the James of the 
latest stage is simply colloquial. Nothing 
more and nothing less. It is a matter of 
inflexions of the voice much more than of 
commas or even of italics. And I have found 
repeatedly that when I read a passage aloud, 
whether from the Prefaces or The Golden Bowl, 
it became, to myself at least, infinitely clear, 
though no less infinitely embroidered and 
decorative. 

Whether that implies that, in his latest 
phase, Mr. James has been riding his Muse 
and his Method to death, or whether it means 
>that he is sapiently aiming a shaft at oblivion, 
I am scarcely concerned to say. It has at 
any rate been anticipated that all the novels 
of the indefinitely distant future shall be read 
out from gramophones to public assemblies. 
In that Utopia A Small Boy would be limpid. 

But of this I am certain : Looking upon the 
immense range of the books written by this 
author, upon the immensity of the scrupulous 
labours, upon the fineness of the mind, the 
nobility of the character, the highness of the 
hope, the greatness of the quest, the felicity 
of the genius and the truth that is at once 
beauty and more than beauty — of this I am 
certain, that such immortality as mankind has 
to bestow (most of them haven't any souls !) 

174 



METHODS 

whether of the talking hooter, or of the silent 
pages, will rest upon the author of Daisy 
Miller, It will rest also with the author of The 
Golden Bowl, 



175 



APPENDIX 



M 



APPENDIX 

The following comparisons of passages from 
the earlier editions of JNIr. James', with the same 
passages revised and amplified for the Definitive 
Edition, published by JNIessrs. Macmillan, may 
be of interest to the reader. 

Daisi/ Miller (Edition : Macmillan^ 1883). 

" Oil, blazes ; it's har-r-d ! " he exclaimed, pro- 
nouncing the adjective in a peculiar manner. 

Winterbourne had immediately perceived that he 
might have the honour of claiming him as a fellow- 
countryman. " Take care you don't hurt your teeth," 
he said, paternally. 

" I haven't got any teeth to hurt. They have all 
come out. I have only got seven teeth. My mother 
counted them last night, and one came out right 
afterwards. She said she'd slap me if any more came 
out. I can't help it. It's this old Europe. It's 
the climate that makes them come out. In America 
they didn't come out. It's these hotels." 

Winterbourne was much amused. '' If you eat 
three lumps of sugar your mother will certainly slap 
you," he said. 

" She's got to give me some candy, then," rejoined 
his young interlocutor. " I can't get any candy here 

179 



HENRY JAMES 

— any American candy. American candy's the best 
candy." 

" And are American little boys the best little 
boys ? " asked Winterbom-ne. 

" I don't know. I'm an American boy," said the 
child. 

" I see you are one of the best ! " laughed Winter- 
bourne. 

" Are you an American man ? " pursued this 
vivacious infant. And then, on Winterbourne's 
affirmative reply, " American men are the best," he 
declared. 

His companion thanked him for the compliment ; 
and the child, who had noAv got astride of his alpen- 
stock, stood looking about him, while he attacked a 
second lump of sugar. Winterbourne wondered if he 
himself had been like this in his infancy, for he had 
been brought to Europe at about this age. 

" Here comes my sister ! " cried the child in a 
moment ; " she's an American girl." 

Winterbourne looked along the path and saw a 
beautiful young lady advancing. " American girls 
are the best girls," he said, cheerfully, to his young 
companion. 

" My sister ain't the best ! " the child declared. 
" She's always blowing at me." 

" I imagine that is your fault, not hers," said 
Winterbourne. The young lady meanwhile had 
drawn near. She was dressed in white muslin, with 
a hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale- 
coloured ribbon. She was bareheaded; but she 
balanced in her hand a large parasol, with a deep 

180 



APPENDIX 

border of embroidery ; and she was strikingly, ad- 
mirably pretty. *' How pretty they are ! " thought 
Winterbom-ne, straightening himself in his seat, as 
if he were prepared to rise. 

The young lady paused in front of his bench, near 
the parapet of the garden, which overlooked the lake. 
The little boy had now converted his alpenstock into 
a vaulting-pole, by the aid of which he was springing 
about in the gravel, and kicking it up not a little. 

'' Randolph," said the young lady, " what are you 
doing ? " 

" I'm going up the Alps," replied Randolph. " This 
is the way ! " And he gave another little jump, 
scattering the pebbles about Winterbourne's ears. 

" That's the way they come down," said Winter- 
bourne. 

" He's an American man ! " cried Randolph, in his 
little hard voice. 

The young lady gave no heed to this announcement, 
but looked straight at her brother. " Well, I guess 
you had better be quiet," she simply observed. 

It seemed to Winterbourne that he had been in a 
manner presented. He got up and stepped slowly 
towards the young girl, throwing away his cigarette. 
" This little boy and I have made acquaintance," he 
said, with great civility. In Geneva, as he had been 
perfectly aware, a young man was not at liberty to 
speak to a young unmarried lady except under certain 
rarely-occurring conditions ; but here at Vevey, what 
conditions could be better than these ? — a pretty 
American girl coming and standing in front of you 
in a garden. This pretty American girl, however, on 

181 



HENRY JAMES 

hearing Winterbourne's observation, simply glanced 
at him ; she then turned her head and looked over the 
parapet, at the lake and the opposite mountains. 
He wondered whether he had gone too far ; but he 
decided that he must advance further, rather than 
retreat. While he was thinking of something else to 
say, the young lady turned to the little boy again. 

Daisy Miller (Definitive Edition, Vol. XVIII., 
Macmillan, 1909). 

" Oh, blazes ; it's har-r-d ! " he exclaimed, divesting 
vowel and consonants, pertinently enough, of any 
taint of softness. 

Winterbourne had immediately gathered that he 
might have the honour of claiming him as a country- 
man. '' Take care you don't hurt your teeth," he said 
paternally. 

" I haven't got any teeth to hurt. They've all 
come out. I've only got seven teeth. Mother counted 
them last night, and one came out right afterwards. 
She said she'd slap me if any more came out. I 
can't help it. It's this old Europe. It's the climate 
that makes them come out. In America they didn't 
come out. It's these hotels." 

Winterbourne was much amused. " If you eat 
three lumps of sugar your mother will certainly slap 
you," he ventured. 

" She's got to give me some candy, then," rejoined 
his young interlocutor. " I can't get any candy here 
— any American candy. American candy's the 
best candy." 

" And are American little boys the best little 
boys ? " Winterbourne asked. 

182 



APPENDIX 

"I don't know. Tm an American boy," said the 
child. 

" I see you're one of the best ! " the young man 
laughed. 

" Are you an American man ? '* pursued this 
vivacious infant. And then on his friend's affirmative 
reply, " American men are the best," he declared 
with assurance. 

His companion thanked him for the compliment, 
and the child, who had now got astride of his alpen- 
stock, stood looking about him while he attacked 
another lump of sugar. Winterbourne wondered if he 
himself had been like this in his infancy, for he had 
been brought to Europe at about the same age. 

" Here comes my sister ! " cried his young com- 
patriot. " She's an American girl, you bet ! " 

Winterbourne looked along the path and saw a 
beautiful young lady advancing. '' American girls 
are the best girls," he thereupon cheerfully remarked 
to his visitor. 

" My sister ain't the best ! " the child promptly 
returned. " She's always blowing at me." 

" I imagine that's your fault, not hers," said 
Winterbourne. The young lady meanwhile had 
drawn near. She was dressed in white muslin, 
with a hundred frills and flounces and knots of pale- 
coloured ribbon. Bareheaded, she balanced in her 
hand a large parasol with a deep border of embroidery; 
and she was strikingly, admirably pretty. " How 
pretty they are ! " thought our friend, who straight- 
ened himself in his seat as if he were ready to rise. 

The young lady paused in front of his bench, 

183 



HENRY JAMES 

near the parapet of the garden, which overlooked the 
lake. The small boy had now converted his alpen- 
stock into a vaulting-pole, by the aid of which he was 
springing about in the gravel and kicking it up not a 
little. "Why, Randolph," she freely began, "what 
are you doing ? " 

" I'm going up the Alps ! " cried Randolph. 
" This is the way ! " and he gave another extravagant 
jump, scattering the pebbles about Winterbourne's 
ears. 

" That's the way they come down," said Winter- 
bourne. 

" He's an American man ! " proclaimed Randolph 
in his harsh little voice. 

The young lady gave no heed to this circumstance, 
but looked straight at her brother. " Well, I guess 
you'd better be quiet," she simply observed. 

It seemed to Winterbourne that he had been in a 
manner presented. He got up and stepped slowly 
toward the charming creature, throwing away his 
cigarette. " This little boy and I have made acquaint- 
ance," he said, with great civility. In Geneva, as he 
had been perfectly aware, a young man wasn't at 
liberty to speak to a young unmarried lady save 
under certain rarely-occurring conditions ; but here 
at Vevey what conditions could be better than 
these ? — a pretty American girl coming to stand in 
front of you in a garden with all the confidence in 
life. This pretty American girl, whatever that might 
prove, on hearing Winterbourne's observation, simply 
glanced at him ; she then turned her head and looked 
over the parapet, at the lake and the opposite moun- 

184 



APPENDIX 

tains. He wondered whether he had gone too far, 
but decided that he must gallantly advance rather 
than retreat. While he was thinking of something 
else to say the young lady turned again to the little 
boy, whom she addressed quite as if they were alone 
together. " I should like to know where you got 
that pole." 



Four Meetings (Edition : Macmillan, 1883). 

I SAW her only four times, but I remember them 
vividly ; she made an impression upon me. I 
thought her very pretty and very interesting — a 
charming specimen of a type. I am very sorry to 
hear of her death ; and yet, when I think of it, why 
should I be sorry ? The last time I saw her she was 

certainly not But I will describe all our meetings 

in order. 

I 

The first one took place in the country, at a little 
tea-party, one snowy night. It must have been some 
seventeen years ago. My friend Latouche, going to 
spend Christmas with his mother, had persuaded 
me to go with him, and the good lady had given in our 
honour the entertainment of which I speak. To me 
it was really entertaining ; I had never been in the 
depths of New England at that season. It had been 
snowing all day, and the drifts were knee-high. 
I wondered how the ladies had made their way to 

185 



HENRY JAMES 

the house ; but I perceived that at Grimwinter a con- 
versazione offering the attraction of two gentlemen 
from New York was felt to be worth an effort. 

Mrs. Latouche, in the course of the evening, asked 
me if I " didn't want to " show the photographs to 
some of the young ladies. The photographs were in a 
couple of great portfolios, and had been brought home 
by her son, who, like myself, was lately returned from 
Europe. I looked round, and was struck with the 
fact that most of the young ladies were provided 
with an object of interest more absorbing than the 
most vivid sun-picture. But there was a person 
standing alone near the mantel-shelf, and looking 
round the room with a small gentle smile which 
seemed at odds, somehow, with her isolation. I 
looked at her a moment, and then said, " I should like 
to show them to that young lady." 

" Oh, yes," said Mrs. Latouche, '' she is just the 
person. She doesn't care for flirting ; I will speak 
to her." 

I rejoined that if she did not care for flirting, she 
was, perhaps, not just the person ; but Mrs. Latouche 
had already gone to propose the photographs to her. 

'' She's delighted," she said, coming back. " She is 
just the person, so quiet and so bright." And then she 
told me the young lady was, by name. Miss Caroline 
Spencer, and with this she introduced me. 

Four Meetings (Definitive Edition^ Vol. XVI, 
Macmillan, 1909). 

I SAW her but four times, though I remember them 
vividly ; she made her impression on me. I thought 

186 



APPENDIX 

her very pretty and very interesting — a touching 
specimen of a type with which I had had other and 
perhaps less charming associations. I'm sorry to hear 
of her death, and yet when I think of it, why should I 
be ? The last time I saw her she was certainly 
not ! But it will be of interest to take our meet- 
ings in order. 

I 

The first was in the country, at a small tea-party, 
one snowy night of some seventeen years ago. My 
friend Latouche, going to spend Christmas with his 
mother, had insisted on my company, and the good 
lady had given in our honour the entertainment of 
which I speak. To me it was really full of savour — 
it had all the right marks : I had never been in the 
depths of New England at that season. It had been 
snowing all day and the drifts were knee-high. I 
wondered how the ladies had made their way to the 
house ; but I inferred that just those general rigours 
rendered any assembly offering the attraction of two 
gentlemen from New York worth a desperate effort. 

Mrs. Latouche in the course of the evening asked 
me if I " didn't want to " show the photographs to 
some of the young ladies. The photographs were in a 
couple of great portfolios, and had been brought home 
by her son, who, like myself, was lately returned from 
Europe. I looked round and was struck with the fact 
that most of the young ladies were provided with an 
object of interest more absorbing than the most 
vivid sun-picture. But there was a person alone near 
the mantel-shelf who looked round the room with a 
small vague smile, a discreet, a disguised yearning, 

187 



HENRY JAMES 

which seemed somehow at odds with her isolation. 
I looked at her a moment and then chose. " I 
should like to show them to that young lady." 

" Oh, yes," said Mrs. Latouche, " she's just the 
person. She doesn't care for flirting — I'll speak to 
her." I replied that if she didn't care for flirting she 
wasn't perhaps just the person ; but Mrs. Latouche 
had already, with a few steps, appealed to her par- 
ticipation. " She's delighted," my hostess came back 
to report ; " and she's just the person — so quiet and 
so bright." And she told me the young lady was by 
name Miss Caroline Spencer — with which she intro- 
duced me. 



Four Meetiiigs (Edition : Macmillan, 1883). 

I RESENTED cxtrcmcly this scornful treatment of poor 
Caroline Spencer's humble hospitality ; but I said 
nothing, in order to say nothing uncivil. I only looked 
on Mr. Mixter, who had clasped his arms round his 
knees and was watching my companion's demonstra- 
tive graces in solemn fascination. She presently saw 
that I was observing him ; she glanced at me with a 
little bold explanatory smile. " You know, he 
adores me," she murmured, putting her nose into 
her tapestry again. I expressed the promptest 
credence, and she went on. " He dreams of becoming 
my lover ! Yes, it's his dream. He has read a French 
novel ; it took him six months. But ever since 

188 



APPENDIX 

that he has thought himself the hero, and me the 
heroine ! " 

Mr. Mixter had evidently not an idea that he was 
being talked about ; he was too preoccupied with the 
ecstasy of contemplation. At this moment Caroline 
Spencer came out of the house, bearing a coffee-pot 
on a little tray. I noticed that on her way from the 
door to the table she gave me a single quick, vaguely- 
appealing glance. I wondered what it signified ; 
I felt that it signified a sort of half -frightened longing 
to know what, as a man of the world who had been in 
France, I thought of the Countess. It made me 
extremely uncomfortable. I could not tell her that 
the Countess was very possibly the runaway wife of a 
little hair-dresser. I tried suddenly, on the contrary, 
to show a high consideration for her. But I got up ; 
I couldn't stay longer. It vexed me to see Caroline 
Spencer standing there like a waiting-maid. 

" You expect to remain some time at Grim- 
winter ? " I said to the Countess. 

She gave a terrible shrug. 

" Who knows ? Perhaps for years. When one is 
in misery ! . . . Chere belle,'' she added, turning to 
Miss Spencer, '' you have forgotten the cognac ! " 

I detained Caroline Spencer as, after looking a 
moment in silence at the little table, she was turning 
away to procure this missing delicacy. I silently gave 
her my hand in farewell. She looked very tired, but 
there was a strange hint of prospective patience in her 
severely mild little face. I thought she was rather 
glad I was going. Mr. Mixter had risen to his feet 
and was pouring out the Countess's coffee. As I went 

189 



HENRY JAMES 

back past the Baptist church I reflected that poor 
Miss Spencer had been right in her presentiment 
that she should still see something of that dear old 
Europe. 

Four Meetings (Definitive Edition, Vol. XVIj 
Macmillan, 1909). 

I RESENTED extremely so critical a view of my poor 
friend's exertions, but I said nothing at all — the only 
way to be sure of my civility. I dropped my eyes on 
Mr. Mixter, who, sitting cross-legged and nursing his 
knees, watched my companion's foreign graces with an 
interest that familiarity had apparantly done little to 
restrict. She became aware, naturally, of my mystified 
view of him and faced the question with all her boldness. 
" He adores me, you know," she murmured with her 
nose again in her tapestry — " he dreams of becoming 
mon amoreux. Yes, il me fait une cour acharnee — ■ 
such as you see him. That's what we've come to. 
He has read some French novel — it took him six 
months. But ever since that he has thought himself 
a hero and me — such as I am, monsieur — je ne sais 
quelle devergondee ! " 

Mr. Mixter may have inferred that he was to that 
extent the object of our reference ; but of the manner 
in which he was handled he must have had small 
suspicion — preoccupied as he was, as to my com- 
panion, with the ecstasy of contemplation. Our 
hostess moreover at this moment came out of the 
house, bearing a coffee-pot and three cups on a neat 
little tray. I took from her eyes, as she approached 
us, a brief but intense appeal — the mute expression, 

190 



APPENDIX 

as I felt, conveyed in the hardest Kttle look she had 
yet addressed me, of her longing to know what, as a 
man of the world in general and of the French world in 
particular, I thought of these allied forces now so 
encamped on the stricken field of her life. I could 
only " act " however, as they said at North Verona, 
quite impenetrably — only make no answering sign. 
I couldn't intimate, much less could I frankly utter, 
my inward sense of the Countess's probable past, with 
its measure of her virtue, value and accomplishments, 
and of the limits of the consideration to which she 
could properly pretend. I couldn't give my friend a 
hint of how I myself personally " saw " her interesting 
pensioner — whether as the runaway wife of a too- 
Jealous hair-dresser or of a too-morose pastry-cook, 
say ; whether as a very small bourgeoise, in fine, 
who had vitiated her case beyond patching up, or 
even as some character, of the nomadic sort, less 
edifying still. I couldn't let in, by the jog of a shutter, 
as it were, a hard informing ray and then, washing 
my hands of the business, turn my back for ever. 
I could on the contrary but save the situation, my 
own at least, for the moment, by pulling myself 
together with a master hand and appearing to ignore 
everything but that the dreadful person between us 
was a " grande dame." This effort was possible 
indeed but as a retreat in good order and with all 
the forms of courtesy. If I couldn't speak, still less 
could I stay, and I think I must, in spite of everything, 
have turned black with disgust to see Caroline Spencer 
stand there like a waiting-maid. I therefore won't 
answer for the shade of success that may have 

191 



^6 



HENRY JAMES 



attended my saying to the Countess, on my feet 
and as to leave her : " You expect to remain some 
time in these parages ? " 

What passed between us, as from face to face, while 
she looked up at me, that at least our companion may 
have caught, that at least may have sown, for the 
after-time, some seed of revelation. The Countess 
repeated her terrible shrug. " Who knows ? I don't 
see my way — ! It isn't an existence, but when 
one's in misery — ! Chere belle,'' she added as an 
appeal to Miss Spencer, " you've gone and forgotten 
the' fine' r' \ 

I detained that lady as, after considering a moment 
in silence the small array, she was about to turn off 
in quest of this article. I held out my hand in silence 
— I had to go. Her wan set little face, severely 
mild and with the question of a moment before now 
quite cold in it, spoke of extreme fatigue, but also of 
something else strange and conceived — whether a 
desperate patience still, or at last some other despera- 
tion, being more than I can say. What was clearest 
on the whole was that she was glad I was going. Mr. 
Mixter had risen to his feet and was pouring out the 
Countess's coffee. As I went back past the Baptist 
church I could feel how right my poor friend had been 
in her conviction at the other, the still intenser, the 
now historic crisis, that she should still see something 
of that dear old Europe. 



WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH 



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